Memory of Water

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Water is the most versatile of all elements. It isn’t afraid to burn in fire or fade into the sky, it doesn’t hesitate to shatter against sharp rocks in rainfall or drown into the dark shroud of the earth. It exists beyond all beginnings and ends. On the surface nothing will shift, but deep in underground silence, water will hide and with soft fingers coax a new channel for itself, until stone gives in and slowly settles around the secret space.

Death is water’s close companion, and neither of them can be separated from us, for we are made of the versatility of water and the closeness of death. Water doesn’t belong to us, but we belong to water: when it has passed through our fingers and pores and bodies, nothing separates us from earth.

I see it clearly now, the dark and narrow figure standing next to the rock garden, by the tea plants, or walking among the trees. The face is patient, and not unfamiliar. It has been the same face from the beginning. I think it may have been waiting for me all along, even when I did not understand it yet.

I can feel water wanting to leave me. I can feel the weight of my own dust.

A few days passed before I understood my situation.

That first morning, after I turned and saw the blue circle on the front door of the house, I stood still for a long while. The rainwater I had drunk from the gathering-pool trickled down my chin and neck, seeped inside the collar of my tunic. I wiped it on the back of my hand. Tree leaves fluttered in the light wind, and I thought of the wings of blazeflies brushing against the glass walls of a lantern. I stared at the endless loop of the circle, which provided no way out. The ground was still steady under my feet and the sky where it should be. The world carried on with life beyond the invisible barrier that had been raised around me: people were thinking their thoughts, walking on the roads, talking to those they loved. For a moment reality wavered around me unclear, crumbling on the edges and split in two. Some part of me is still walking outside these boundaries, I thought, living the life that was to be. She is on her way to the Lost Lands, and she is nearly as real as I am, in some moments more real, perhaps, but she is looking the other way, and she is not coming back.

The thought broke and blurred and slipped away.

I was here, and nothing could change what I saw.

Branches were swinging in the breeze; light coloured the dense, dark-green mesh of the grass, where stalks knotted into uneven tangles. The only shadow cast on the ground was mine, and in the quiet of the morning I could discern no sounds of footsteps or breathing, no words carried in the wind. I walked to the door and touched the circle. Some paint came off to my fingertips. I wiped the sticky colour on my trousers, and the fabric was stained by three blue streaks. I knew they would be impossible to wash off. The thought left me indifferent.

The floorboards creaked when I stepped into the house. My throat was sand-dry; it hurt to swallow. I stopped in the kitchen, turned the tap on and remembered at once that I had gone to the fell to close the pipe two days earlier. There wouldn’t be any water.

There was water.

I filled a teacup and drained it. I drank another cupful, then one more. The water didn’t stop running. I recognised the taste: it was coming from the spring in the fell. I turned the tap off, then turned it on again. There was still water.

The metal was cold and even under my fingers. I turned the tap off, sat down on the kitchen floor with my legs bent and pressed my forehead into my knees.

I listened to my own breathing. I listened to the movement of blood in my veins. I listened to the silence of the house and tried to understand what had happened.

Faces of villagers surfaced in my mind, requests and words of gratitude on cracked lips, hands lifting full waterskins, their bones ashen fans under the taut skin. Their footsteps heavy-pressed on the ground, when they carried the weight under their clothes that the life of their children or spouses or parents depended on. One of them had entered my house, sat in my kitchen and taken home my water – only water, I corrected in my mind, not my water. Upon returning to the village, they had looked at the posters along the streets, the award sum painted on them. And after days or weeks, footsteps steady or staggering, they had walked to the guard on the street. Said, I’ve got something to tell that might interest you.

How long had the military known?

Had they been following my movements and my travel preparations, did they know about the helicarriage and the fake passpods? Maybe they had known about the spring for weeks already, but had found out somehow that I was going to leave the village, and they had waited. Perhaps they had been keeping watch on the hiding place of the helicarriage, monitoring how Sanja and I carried food and water there. And yesterday, when Sanja had walked along the edge of the plastic grave to wait for me, they had stepped out in the open, three soldiers in their heavy boots and blue uniforms, perhaps only two – just one would have sufficed, because Sanja was not of large build. I could see them blocking her way at the entrance of the underbelly of the bridge below the dark-hanging sky and drawing their sabres from their sheaths. Rain blurred the blades into a blistering mirror surface. One of the soldiers tied her hands behind her back while the other strode into the space under the bridge, where the helicarriage was waiting, ready to go. They took the carriage and the food and water laden into the cart, and drove her away, and she had no way of escaping or contacting me.

I tried not to imagine what had happened to Sanja.

Under all my thoughts I knew that there was another possibility. That she had not been captured. That the soldiers had not needed to come to her.

But I couldn’t think of this. It would not fit within my bounds without shattering them.

I thought of everything I knew about the events at other water crime houses in the village. There wasn’t much: rumours, hearsay. Uncertain glimpses of prisoners, distant and quiet as ghosts. Dried blood on the sand of the garden path.

There was an instant of hollow terror when I realised I might not be able to leave the house, but then I remembered I had already been outside with no consequences. I had no idea how far from the house I could stray. And what would happen when I reached this invisible boundary drawn around my life? Would I be shot dead on the spot, or would a warning be enough?

There was only one way to find out.

My legs were shaking when I stepped out to the veranda.

The path from the front door of the house to the gate was as familiar and commonplace to me as the back of my own hand. I had walked the route countless times, on most days of my life, and I could have described its shape with my eyes closed. Yet now the journey across the grass was strange and new, the arch of each step bright-cut and each movement of the centre of my body as heavy as an uprooted rock. I saw a moth caught in a cobweb under the eaves where I hadn’t seen it the day before. I saw the ripples of the stone slabs, the unevenly slated shape of their edges, the metal-dark layers of the mineral, squeezed against each other by time. I saw my own foot, made of brittle bone and thin skin, which spread pale and vulnerable on the shield of stone in the soft frame of grass-stalks.

Breath passed in me hastily, raggedly, and on each step I expected to feel somewhere in my body – what, exactly? I had seen bullet wounds, bandages tarnished by dry blood and sticky, yellow liquid around them, but I had never seen a bullet find its way to its victim. I had not seen the pain on the face of a person, when metal penetrated their skin and tore their tissues apart and sank into bone. I imagined a stinging, burning agony, like a small explosion in my flesh, and then I tried to imagine the same pain hundredfold, because I was certain my first thought was nowhere near reality. How much would I realise? Would I have time to follow as life slowly left me, or would it all be over so quickly that the screeching pain caused by the wound would barely cut to my consciousness?

Blood weighed in my feet as I forced myself to take one step after another. Grass-stalks fell back under the soles of my shoes and straightened towards the sky again as my feet rose from them.

Something rustled in the direction of the forest. I didn’t see movement among the trees. I realised I had stopped. My breathing sang, stuck in my tense throat. I relaxed my muscles and let the air out of my lungs into the crisp morning that smelled of last night’s rain. The gate wasn’t far away now. A step: in a few long strides I would reach it. A step, another one and another: I could touch the night-chilled metal of the gate if I reached out my arm. A final step: I was standing right in front of the gate.

Leaves swished against each other and wind tugged at the branches. Shadows changed on the sand of the road. The windchime hanging from the pine tree tinkled softly behind me.

I took a breath, closed my eyes and opened the gate.

Nothing happened.

I looked around and still didn’t see anything suggesting another person’s presence.

I took a step through the gate.

Then a second one.

On the third step a sharp but surprisingly faint bang cut the air, as if a thick plank had been split in two with one metallic stroke. A fistful of sand shot into the air only a couple of finger-widths away from my toes. I froze. The echo of the bang faded into the landscape.

As a child I would wrap myself inside a curtain in the corner of my mother’s study and hide in there during thunderstorms, in the soothing, soft dusk where light sieved through the texture of the fabric. I would wait until the menacing cracks in the world sealed and faded away, and it was safe again to walk in the house without the shelter provided by the curtain. Now the same impulse struck through me. Every fibre in my body screamed that I should turn around and run into the house as fast as my feet would take me, curl into the corner inside the curtain, until the cracks of the world would be closed again, and I couldn’t slip through them into the tight-entwined darkness or too-white, all-scorching light. But the curtain had frayed on the edges ages ago, the corner was full of cobwebs and knotted dust, and there was no place left in the house or garden or fell where I could have escaped the cracked-open, glass-edged crevices of the world.

I stepped forward again.

The sound tore through the air and sand spilled on my foot where the bullet reached the ground. I raised my eyes and saw movement perhaps ten metres away: a strip of blue among the tree-trunks, the stabbing glint of metal where sunrays hit it.

My third attempt confirmed what I had begun to suspect. Sand scattered again, just close enough to be an effective warning, but purposefully beyond my outlines. These soldiers knew how to shoot, and they wanted me to know my limits. Nevertheless it seemed that for some reason it wasn’t their intention to hurt me.

A suffocating silence weighed on the landscape, when I slowly backed into the garden through the gate.

When the sun turned to afternoon, I had discovered the boundaries of my captivity. They followed the garden fence everywhere except behind the teahouse, where there was no fence. The invisible wall had been raised approximately ten steps away from the back wall of the teahouse, but I was free to go into the teahouse itself. I concluded that there must be several crackshots in the immediate surroundings of the house, constantly following my movements.

After returning into the house I locked the door and drew all the curtains in every window. I understood now why the windows of the other houses marked with a blue circle had always been covered. When life is chained within narrow limits, the slightest illusion of freedom is valuable. The weathered wood of the door and the fragile glass of the windows would not keep away those who were threatening me, but if I could still hide one small slice of my life from them, make it mine alone, I would not give up this shred of privacy, possibly the last one I had.

I remembered the message-pods. One of them was still where I had packed it in order to take it to the Lost Lands. The other one I had left in the wooden box in my room. I pulled the hacked pod from my bag, placed my finger on the screen and waited for the light to switch on. A row of dots flashed on the display: the device was looking for a connection to a pod network. Eventually the message No network appeared on the screen. I chose the option Search again under it. A minute later the same message reappeared. I walked into my room and dug up the other message-pod. Its screen told me likewise that there was no network in the house. Those keeping me captive had seen to it that I had no way of communicating with the outer world.

Towards the evening I began to get worried about food. I had water, at least for now. I’d filled all my skins from the kitchen tap in case the supply would be cut. There wasn’t much in the way of eating, however. Looking forward to the journey, I had laden the helicarriage with everything that would last longer than a day. In the kitchen cupboard I found a few amaranth crackers and ate one of them with weak tea. I was grateful for the garden; the berries, vegetables and fruits were ripening. However, most of them wouldn’t be edible until several weeks from now. I had enough porridge flakes maybe for a week, if I used them sparingly.

When the sun had dropped as low as it would tonight, I searched the kitchen drawers for a thick-bladed knife. I stood in front of the closed front door. A long time ago, a two-forked metal coat rack had been nailed to the door. I usually hung my insect hood from it. I moved the hood to the shelf on the wall and placed the tip of the knife against the wood, which was painted white. I discerned in the paint brush-strokes, the movement of my mother’s hand: she had scraped off the old paint, made the door look shiny and new again. Over ten years had passed since, and the paint was cracked.

I pressed the blade hard against the door and drew one vertical line on the wood, on my side, the reverse of the blue circle. The paint peeled away under the cut. There was still plenty of space for other lines.

Back in my room I pushed the knife under my pillow. I lay with the light of late summer on my face, the message-pods dark and mute on the table next to my bed.

In the morning I drew another vertical line next to the first one. The air in the house seemed suffocating and stuffy. When I opened the door, I saw a trayful of food had been left on the veranda steps. There wasn’t a lot of it: half a loaf of bread, a handful of dried figs, a small pouch of beans. I placed them to soak in a bowl of water and divided the food carefully into rations, because I didn’t know how many days I would need to survive on it. The empty tray I left where I had found it.

I thought of the water running from the kitchen pipe when it shouldn’t have been, and of the crackshots who deliberately aimed their shots right next to me, but missed. I thought of the food left on the veranda. I began to feel certain of what I couldn’t understand: somebody wanted to keep me alive, at least for the time being.

They also wanted me to be afraid.

The following night I kept watch at the window in order to see if anyone came into the garden. The soldier arrived a little after six o’clock in the morning. He was carrying a tray with a portion of food on it. When he placed it on the veranda steps, I got up despite the tiredness weighing my limbs. He raised his gaze when I opened the door.

‘Why is my house marked?’ I asked.

The soldier picked up the empty tray and didn’t answer. He turned around and started walking away. I went after him. I understood it was not a safe thing to do, but I had to try.

‘What am I being accused of?’ I asked. ‘Couldn’t I speak to somebody?’

The soldier continued to walk without a word. I made a sprint to overtake him and blocked his way. He stopped and placed a hand on the hilt of his sabre. I only realised now that he was the baker’s son I had gone to school with and seen in the village painting posters.

‘Let me speak to somebody,’ I said. ‘If I must live in captivity, I want to know what I’m being accused of, at least.’

He stood there, tense, and I waited for the cold-burning cut of the sabre on my skin. He still didn’t speak.

‘Please,’ I said and hated my own pleading tone of voice. When he didn’t reply, I asked, ‘Why are you doing this?’

His hand remained on the hilt when he said, ‘You’re not permitted to talk to anyone, and I don’t have the answers to your questions. I’m only doing my job.’ He went quiet and observed me, and for a moment I saw in him the boy I had seen running fast on the schoolyard between the classes for years, never paying much thought to him.

‘I should slash your face,’ he continued, ‘but I’ll let it go this once. The other guards may not be as kind. It would be wiser to stay in the house when the food is being brought.’

He started towards the gate again. I stood in my place, because his voice and expression had turned my tongue into stone and rooted my feet into the ground. I had seen a darkness behind his eyes that frightened me: a darkness born not only of things one has had to see despite wanting to look away, but a denser, more pungent one.

A darkness born when one does things from which others want to look away.

I knew with utter certainty that if I followed him or spoke to him again, he would slash me with his sabre and leave me bleeding until I would move no more. I watched him disappear through the gate between the trees, and only many moments later my blood flowed light enough that I could return into the house.

On the evening of the third day I was standing by the rock garden, when I saw movement on the road coming from the village. From the distance I could tell the figure was moving on foot and not wearing a blue uniform. She seemed too short to be Sanja. The figure moved closer, blended with the shadows of the trees, and no one stepped out to cut her way. As she drew nearer to the gate, I recognised her as Mai Harmaja. Approximately ten metres outside the gate she stopped in her tracks and stared at the house. Her eyes shifted and hit me, then her head turned towards the house again, and I knew her gaze was fixed on the door. A moment later she looked around her, turned and started walking back towards the village with hasty footsteps.

As her short figure drew away, I knew I wouldn’t see any more villagers on the road among the trees surrounding the house.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The blade scratched the paint and revealed a light wooden surface below. The line I had just scraped down started the sixth row of marks. I pushed the knife into a sheath that didn’t fit, but was still better than no sheath at all, and placed it in my pocket, just like I had done each morning for the past five weeks.

I had not spoken to anyone after the day when the baker’s son had turned his back on me and walked out of the gate without looking back. Each morning I had found the tray on the steps, and occasionally I had seen a glimpse of a blue uniform, but I hadn’t had the courage to speak again to the soldiers.

Only when the boundaries of life are fragile and close, the aching need to hold on to them becomes clear.

Every morning and evening I would still switch both message-pods on. There is nothing more persistent than hope: even after I imagined I had completely banished the wish that the light on one of them would be flashing, it would flicker in me, and again I had to shove it into the darkness where it would have no space to live or breathe. Every time the lights of the message-pods remained off, my heart would beat a little heavier. But it only lasted a moment, and then my captivity was again opaque mist in which I took one step at a time, not knowing when the view would grow clear or what I would find ahead.

My days were filled with trying to find food in the garden and storing what water I could. The taps in the house had turned unpredictable: sometimes there was water, sometimes there wasn’t. When I wasn’t digging up root vegetables or filling skins and pots, I was making futile guesses of what might be happening in the outside world. I didn’t know what was going on in the village, where around the continent battles were taking place or if the routes to Xinjing were clear. For all I knew, Xinjing might have burned to ground, and the news wouldn’t have reached me. Maybe even the village wasn’t there any longer. Perhaps all that remained were this house and garden, the trees bowing in the wind and the sand road flowing towards the village, the coarse sides of the fells and the sky beyond.

Maybe my mother was there no more. Maybe there was no more Sanja.

There were moments when the muteness of the house, the stillness of my life enclosed within its walls threatened to lock my footsteps entirely, until I felt as if I was turning into stone. First my feet would lose their flexibility, their skin would little by little be tinted rain-grey and harden, until they would no longer bend in the knees or ankles, and I’d have no strength to lift them. Unable to take a step, I would watch the porous substance of rock spread its way in me, disease-like, solidifying my hips and sides and chest, dripping leaden into my fingertips and palms, chaining my wrists and elbows into place. The last to petrify would be my face: the eyelids would remain open, and I would feel my eyes slowly grow dry without being able to blink, listening to the echo of my heart within its shell of stone, until even that would eventually fade.

I had to evade the thoughts that had the power to freeze me. I could not stop, not yet.

I went to pick up the food tray of the day from the steps and brought it into the kitchen, where I emptied the food onto the table. The supply was modest today: a handful of amaranth, a pouch of sunflower seeds. The soldiers had taken notice that the crop in the garden was ripening. After a scanty breakfast I took the tray back to the veranda and went to the bathroom to wash. I got undressed and stepped under the shower. Instead of a burst of cold water, only a few drops leaked from the shower head. I waited a short while, turned off the tap and turned it on again. The water pipe wheezed for a moment and a low, metallic screech sounded from somewhere deep, as if the pipe was turning over. Eventually water gushed forth. I applied foaming soapwort all over myself quickly, because I was already used to the water supply in the house being irregular these days. I thought of the surface of the spring and the white mark which had loomed right below it when I had gone to the fell for the last time, but I felt my blood turning heavy again and banished the thought. At least I still had water at my disposal. Even as a marked criminal I didn’t need to walk in dirty clothes or spend weeks without bathing. Even in my captivity I had more than most villagers in their freedom.

I still didn’t understand the reason for this.

After getting dressed I went to sweep the stone slabs leading to the teahouse. The night dew that clung to the grass brushed my feet through the lattices of my sandals. The day was cloud-wrapped, but did not ooze with the humidity of rain. I collected the leaves fallen on the path into a pile by the corner of the teahouse, selected a handful to scatter on the stones and carried the rest into the compost behind the hut, taking care not to go too close to the border of my invisible prison.

The berries were red-veined and plump on the gooseberry bushes by now, pulling the branches low with their weight. I picked up a bowl from the veranda. Gooseberries pattered against the plastic, calming as rain; their juice burst sweet into my mouth and their seeds crunched between my teeth. As I was carrying my hoard of berries towards the house, my fingers tender from the prickling bushes, I saw a helicarriage approaching on the road. At first I didn’t pay much attention to it. Soldiers would come and go around the house, mostly by foot, but occasionally a helicarriage would bring them and take them away. The change of guard was usually unnoticeable: some moments I could almost pretend that there was nothing out of the ordinary going on in my life, because the soldiers kept their presence mostly invisible as long as I didn’t try to cross the line.

This helicarriage, however, stopped under the seagrass shelter for visitors’ vehicles, which none of the previous ones had done. I put the berry bowl down on the edge of the veranda. A tall man stepped from the carriage. He walked through the gate into the garden, stopped in front of me and bowed.

I did not bow back.

‘Commander Taro,’ I said. ‘What have I done to deserve this unexpected honour?’

Taro stepped closer, so close I could see my own reflection in his hard, black eyes despite the mesh of his insect hood. My muscles stirred, wanting to step back, but I forced myself to stand still. He was measuring me with his gaze. I did not lower mine.

‘I can see you haven’t changed since our last meeting, Miss Kaitio,’ Taro said. The corners of his mouth twisted into a smile that made me think of knives and sabres and something even sharper. ‘What do you think of our hospitality?’ He waved his hand, as if catching the house and garden in his fist. ‘I think we have been extraordinarily kind: there is plenty of space for exercise, food and water are regularly delivered. Few prisoners enjoy such luxury.’

‘I can’t deny I have wondered why I’ve been given such privileges,’ I replied. ‘I presume you have come to enlighten me.’

Taro seemed amused, but the expression was like a thin mask placed over his features. Nothing moved behind his eyes.

‘It would be a shame to let your special skills go unused, Miss – I mean Master Kaitio,’ he said. ‘So I’m suggesting we have this conversation over a cup of tea. Would you be so kind and perform a ceremony to honour my visit?’

Despite his formally polite tone I knew it was not a request.

‘Give me fifteen minutes, Commander Taro, so I can prepare everything. There are no sweets,’ I remarked without trying to soften the tone of my voice. ‘You will accept my apologies for that, I expect.’

‘As you wish, Master Kaitio,’ he replied.

I left him on the lawn and walked into the house. After making sure that the curtains were tightly closed, I took the tea master’s ceremony outfit from my wardrobe and put it on. It was softer and more familiar than it had been one distant Moonfeast day that now belonged to another age and life, when I had first worn it. Yet there was still something alien about it, as if I was wearing a skin that wasn’t my own, but merely borrowed. Dressing up in the master’s outfit was an irrational and pointless thing to do: I knew Taro didn’t expect it from me. But the unchanged form of the tea ceremony bound to the unbroken chain of masters was the only tangible bridge I could build between my own vulnerability and the inviolability of a tea master. The outfit offered a shield behind which I could take cover.

There were several tea sets in the teahouse, and I had swept and aired the hut daily, even washed the floors a few times, so I only needed to carry the water. Ten minutes later I stepped out of the house wearing my outfit and holding a waterskin I had filled from the kitchen tap.

I did not see Taro right away. Then I noticed that he was standing outside the teahouse and sprinkling water on the lawn from the stone basin in front of it. Moistening the grass with water marked a symbolic purification of the teahouse and its surroundings, and no one besides tea masters and their apprentices was permitted to do it. Anger rose bitter in my throat and behind my eyes. The soles of my sandals slapped softly on the stone slabs as I walked to the hut.

‘I’m afraid you will have to crawl through the visitors’ entrance again,’ I said. ‘We didn’t change its height when we repaired the teahouse.’

Taro wiped his moist hands on the thick fabric of his trousers and smiled his sharpened smile. The look in his black eyes shifted like a movement flickering in a mirror in a dark room.

‘I thought so,’ he replied.

Neither of us bowed. I walked around the teahouse to the master’s entrance.

When I had started the fire, poured the water into the cauldron to heat up and placed the tea set on a tray, I slid the door of the visitors’ entrance slightly open. A moment later Taro entered on his knees. He had left his insect hood outside. Without any thought, directed by my muscle memory, I bowed to him. A smile spread on his face again, and he bowed back. It seemed to me that he exaggerated the gesture with scorn, but so slightly that I couldn’t tell for certain. Blood rushed to my cheeks. I took a deep breath and thought of water: water that carried and chained me, water that separated me from dust, water that had not deserted me, not yet.

There were ten bubbles at the bottom of the cauldron.

I prepared the tea and offered the cup to Taro. He took it unhurriedly, blew into it, did not sip, because the tea was still too hot, and placed it down on the floor.

He was watching me steadily, and I knew I was being assessed. The weight and coldness of his intent terrified me. He had come here with a goal in his mind. I did not know what it was, but as he was sitting there, unmoving and soundless, I knew nothing could disrupt it, nothing break or even scratch its glistening, hard surface. He was not in a hurry. He could wait and look for my weak spot until he found it.

Eventually, after a long silence, he said, ‘You’re not afraid of me, Noria. Why not?’

I noticed that he had dropped the titles and used my first name, which was a deliberate breach of etiquette, a disrespectful way of addressing the tea master during the ceremony. I did not reply, and he did not take his eyes off me.

‘You do realise I could hurt you if I wanted to?’ he continued. His expression did not change. ‘Or I could order someone else to do it, and watch.’

I understood it, of course. Everyone knew of the things taking place in darkness, those from which it was easier to avert your eyes. I had thought of them, maybe too much. Of my mother, the walls around her, perhaps thicker and closer than those that held me; of unbending metal that might be grazing her delicate, fragile skin. Of Sanja. I pushed her from my mind, again, because my boundaries began to shake and crumble, and I couldn’t let this happen, not now.

‘Yet you speak defiantly and do not bow to me,’ Taro said. ‘Why?’

I said the only thing I knew to say in that situation, and as the words left my mouth, I realised they were true.

‘You can no longer do anything to me that matters.’

Taro lifted the cup to his lips, blew into it again and took a drink.

‘Nothing at all?’ he asked. The same evaluating look remained in the blackness of his eyes. ‘What if I said I can give you your life back?’

‘I wouldn’t believe you,’ I replied.

‘I know about the spring,’ Taro said. ‘But I’m sure you had guessed that already. It would have been wise to tell about it. I understand your father was stubborn in the matter, and transferred the same stubbornness to you. The worn-out traditions of tea masters are tedious from my point of view. But of course it was only a matter of time when my suspicions would be confirmed.’ Taro ran his finger along the round rim of the teacup. My mother had taught me to sound a drinking glass using the same movement: when you brushed the rim with a moistened finger, it created a strange, high-pitched sound which echoed and filled me with restlessness like an escaping thought I couldn’t catch. My mother had told me that if you played the glass for too long, it would break. I hadn’t dared to brush out the sound from a single glass since.

‘Even most tea masters have forgotten this,’ Taro continued, ‘because they have been living in cities for many generations now, but the hidden core of the profession pertains that tea masters were once guardians of springs. Your father trusted his luck too much. A backwater village tea master who has been able to resist the temptation of the cities, whose garden is flourishing and whose tea tastes better than the tea of those who buy the best-quality water? It was obvious which secret he was guarding.’

Taro’s fingers stopped on the rim of the cup. I had listened to him speak with growing restlessness, and I couldn’t contain myself.

‘What do you know about the alliance of tea masters and water?’ I asked, more hotly than I had meant.

Taro’s smile was like the sound of ringing glass.

‘There’s no need for you to look so worried. Your father was not lying when he told you it was hidden knowledge,’ he said. ‘It’s true. Only those who have been trained as tea masters know.’

I nearly asked how many of them he had tortured in order to gain this secret information, but words stopped in my mouth and something in my memory stirred.

From the beginning, there had been a distinct deliberateness about Taro’s way of breaching the etiquette of the ceremony. I had met tea guests who made mistakes because they were not familiar with the etiquette, or because they had forgotten part of it. Their errors were coloured either by confusion or ignorance: they were embarrassed that their unlearned background was revealed in their mistakes, or they didn’t even know there was an exact etiquette to be followed, and cared little. Taro, however, had already on his first visit given the impression that had he wished to, he could have followed the etiquette perfectly, but breached it on purpose just because he had the power to do so. He was familiar with the tea ceremony down to every detail as much as I was, and because of this, he knew precisely how to offend the tea master and other guests.

Every memory I had of him revealed itself in new light: how he turned his first tea visit into a cross-examination, how he ordered the teahouse to be taken apart, knowing that rebuilding it in the same way would not be possible, how he had the tea masters’ books confiscated from the house although he must have known no tea master would leave a written record of a secret spring behind. How he had sprinkled water on the grass despite the fact that it was the task of the tea master and apprentice alone, and would mean contaminating the ceremony if performed by anyone else.

He watched me, and waited. Waited for me to understand.

‘You are a tea master,’ I said.

Taro turned his head slightly. I couldn’t read his expression.

‘I was,’ he replied. ‘Or to be more accurate, I was supposed to be. I learned from my father, who was a watcher of water, one of the last. He despised the masters of the cities, regarded them as traitors to the profession.’

The humidity rising from the cauldron floated in the air of the teahouse, concentrating on the window and my face.

‘But you’re not practising,’ I said.

Taro drained his cup, placed it down on the floor and pushed it towards me. I filled it.

‘Not after I revealed the location of my father’s spring to the military,’ he said. ‘I also let them know that I might be interested in an army career. They were very favourable towards me after that. But we are woolgathering,’ he said. ‘As I said, I can give you your life back, if you want.’ He lifted the cup to his lips, but the liquid was still too hot, and he placed it down again. ‘Maybe not exactly as it was, but a large enough part.’

I kept my hands on my knees, although I wanted to wipe the humidity from my brow, and said nothing.

‘You haven’t heard, have you? About your mother.’

I knew I shouldn’t have agreed to trading with him, but I had been staring at the blank screen of the message-pod for too many days, and my thoughts had built too many stories I did not want to follow to the end. I had no power to stop my words.

‘What do you know about my mother?’

Taro’s expression did not change.

‘There was a rebellion in Xinjing. Your mother has been missing for a month,’ he said. ‘She is believed to be dead.’

I had been fearing this knowledge, and yet now, faced with it, I felt nothing. Grief would come later, but now it simply poured off me and dissipated and left an emptiness behind.

‘It’s not in my power to bring back the dead,’ Taro said. ‘But what about those who are still alive?’

He saw me startle and I read contentment on his face.

‘Isn’t there someone else you would save if you could?’

My breathing clung to my throat and my heart beat faster.

‘Where is she?’ I asked.

Taro tilted his head and his expression steadied into contemplation.

‘She asked me to deliver a message. She asked you to accept my offer.’

I swallowed.

‘What’s the offer?’

‘You can both have your freedom back and you may continue your lives just until now, in peace, protected by the military. You could even use the spring more freely than the rest of the villagers.’

I thought of the weeks when the spring had been ours alone. The corners of Taro’s mouth twitched, and I knew he had seen the change on my face. I forced myself to look him directly in the eye.

‘On what condition?’

‘You only need to consent to the spring belonging to the military from now on, and to both of you working for me.’ He paused, letting the words sink in. ‘You made some crucial mistakes, of course, but you also showed intellect and cunning. I nearly believed for a while that there was no spring. Muromäki had to spy on you for a long time and make a lot of enquiries before he found out where the water was coming from and how it was being smuggled to the village. We could use spies with your skills.’

For the second time during our conversation images shifted in my memory and their details were laid out in a new manner. Muromäki’s tea visit on the wrong day, him stopping at the gate of Sanja’s house and his conversation with Sanja. And a memory that was almost lost, but surfaced now, clear amidst others: the blond-haired guest at my father’s funeral, the face that had seemed familiar but I had been unable to name. All this time I had not understood how the net was closing in around me.

Everything was still in the room, and I couldn’t see the path ahead of me due to the mist rising from past weeks and their incomprehensibility, the cracks of the world, a dark mirror in which I couldn’t discern my own face.

‘And Sanja asked me to accept that?’

‘She said she would, if it meant you could see each other again.’

I thought of Sanja, and I could feel myself turning towards the thought. I was weary. ‘Yes’ was an easy word in my mouth, and the image behind my eyes impossible to turn away: her hand in mine in the spring, where the restless current pressed against our outlines, our mark forever in the memory of the world and water.

I closed my eyes and drew in a breath.

‘She believed it would be worth it,’ Taro continued softly. ‘That’s why she came to us.’

I opened my eyes. Words slipped away, and images, and all that I could not make true even if I wanted to.

‘You are lying,’ I said.

Taro’s face twisted into an expression that wasn’t quite a smile, and something fell off, a mask, a carefully woven plan – I wasn’t sure which. I just saw that a crack had appeared in his solid intent, and before he had arranged his face into an unmoving blank canvas again, I knew I was right.

‘I could admit that I am,’ Taro said. ‘But you don’t know that. You only have my word, and you don’t trust me.’ He went quiet. We gazed at each other, and the only things moving in the room were our breathing and our thoughts. ‘What if I told you that Sanja didn’t come to us because of you, but because she wanted to protect her family? Would you find that easier to believe?’

Shadows wrapped Sanja and carried her further from me, until I could no longer see her. I did not raise my hand. I did not speak a word to forestall her. She walked away and did not look back.

I was alone, and I said the only thing I could.

‘Nothing will make me accept your offer.’

Taro lifted the teacup to his lips, drained it slowly, wiped his mouth and placed the cup on the floor.

‘Is that your final word?’ he asked. ‘Think carefully. There won’t be another chance.’

‘It is.’

Taro nodded. The finality of the gesture echoed in the walls of the narrow room. He got to his feet and his shadow fell over me. For a moment it merged with me as if it was my own.

I moved across the floor to the visitors’ entrance and opened it slightly for Taro. He kneeled down again and was just about to crawl out to the veranda, but stopped and turned towards me.

‘I’m curious,’ he said, and for the first time I saw something in him that resembled genuine interest. ‘Why? Do you believe that there is some reward waiting for you, in another life or afterlife, if you do what you imagine is the right thing?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I believe that we must make hard choices every day despite knowing that there is no reward.’

‘Why?’ he repeated.

‘Because if this is all there is, it’s the only way to leave a mark of your life that makes any difference.’

Taro did not nod, did not smile, did not sneer. He just looked, and turned again to go.

‘I’m curious too,’ I said, and he stopped. ‘If you don’t believe in rewards, if you know even your power will fade, why do you keep hoarding it and doing things you know to be wrong?’

Taro did not stir at my question. He was quiet. I heard his breathing in the humid air of the hut, and I imagined there was a nearly unnoticeable quiver in his expression, but I was probably wrong. He was looking away, and when he turned his face towards me again, it was only cold glass and stone I saw.

‘Because if this is all there is,’ he finally said, ‘I might as well enjoy it while it lasts.’

We sat still on our knees, turned towards each other, and nothing separated us, and nothing held us together. His choices could have been mine; all shadows share the same colour, and they all disappear in the dark.

‘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.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

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.

The memory shifted: a leather-covered book was heavy in my hands, and on its pages words were building a bridge to the past that would have been lost otherwise. Characters drawn by the hand of a long-gone tea master pulled me in, and somehow he was still there, alive between those covers, because of what he had left behind. The sentences caught me and dragged me back from the shrouding silence.

This is my last story, and after I have recorded it on these pages, my water may run dry freely.

There are just events that people give the shape of stories in order to understand them better.

Too many stories are lost, and too few of those that remain are true.

Despite the chill emanating from the gap under the door, the wooden floor felt warm when I pressed my palms against it and slowly pushed myself up. It was like struggling against a strong wind: I had to force myself to stay in the sitting position and not give in to the fatigue that weighed on me, trying to pull me back down. The bag was only a metre or so away. I lifted my hand and reached for it, fumbled for the shoulder strap and nearly lost my balance. Eventually I managed to get a grasp of the tightly woven fabric and pull the bag towards myself. I took the tea master’s book out of the bag. The leather of the cover was soft against my fingertips.

My handwriting ran across the pages, slanted and narrow. The entries described dutifully the ceremonies and teaware used, weather, how the guests were dressed and how they behaved. Yet most of the space was taken by the log of the Jansson expedition, which I had written down from the silver-coloured discs: fragmentary, incomplete, but still true at its core. I kept turning the pages and arrived at the contents of the final disc I had listened to with Sanja one cloudy summer afternoon.

It was an account of ruin and devastation, of oceans reaching towards the centres of the continents, swallowing land and fresh water. Millions fleeing their homes, wars fought over fuel resources revealed under the melting ice, until the veins of the earth ran dry. People wounding their world until they lost it.

Then it turned into a tale of truths forged and lies told and history changed for ever: a story of books crumbling into shreds of paper mist at the bottom of the sea and replaced with the easily modifiable pod-books, until any event could be erased with a few pushes of buttons from the memory of the world, until responsibility for wars or accidents or lost winters no longer belonged to anyone.

It was a story those holding power in New Qian had sought to destroy, just like they had destroyed almost everything else about the past-world. And yet I was holding it in my hands: not the whole truth, because the whole truth never survives, but something that was not entirely lost.

I stared at the sentences on the pages and I began to understand what I needed to do.

I could stay put and wait until dust defeated water. I could let someone else tell my tale, if it would be told at all: someone who would twist it and make it unrecognisable and perhaps harness it to their own purposes. If I left my story to those who had drawn the blue circle on my door, it would no longer be mine. I would no longer be in it. I would no longer be anywhere.

I could let that happen. Or I could try to leave my mark on the world, give it my own shape.

The final third of the tea master’s book was still blank.

My legs barely carried me when I got to my feet.

Thick curtains were covering the window of my room. In the twilight I opened the tea master’s book on a new, blank page, sat down on the bed and moved the blaze lantern on the nightstand so that it cast enough light across the pages.

Ink glistened at the tip of my pen and left a star-shaped stain on the paper as I started work.

The words were slow to come at first, faint and wan in the darkness where they’d been stowed away for a long time. But as I reached for them, they began to flicker and flash and float towards me, and their shapes grew clearer. When they finally burst to the surface, bright and bold, I caught what I could and let them pour out of me.

I wrote about the hidden spring that no one else had ever written about before. I wrote about the fishfires that wavered in the sky-ocean like wide shoals of fish flashing their scales and in which you could see the forms of dragons if you knew how to look. I wrote about the plastic grave, the secrets drowned in its layers, the crushed past-objects that had once belonged to somebody and meant something, each one of them.

The sentences on the paper broke the circle of place and time. Water ran to the house from the fell again, and my father was walking in the rooms. I saw the way he would stretch his fingers after raking the rock garden and placing the rake against the railing of the veranda, and the way he would knit his eyebrows whenever he bent his head over the cauldron to count the bubbles at the bottom. My mother was sitting in her study, and I saw her stroking back her hair, lost in thought, and tilting her head as she tried to remember where she had left her pen. I smelled the lavender and mint scent of her homemade soap, and the onion stew my father would sometimes cook. I heard their footsteps: one slow and steady pair, the other more emphatic and impatient. Their voices filled the kitchen again and floated in the garden, and I wasn’t alone anymore.

I wrote about Sanja. The glow that would take over her face when she was picking out pieces one by one from the guts of a past-machine in her workshop, memorising their order and placing them neatly on the table. The way one corner of her mouth would rise a bit higher than the other when she smiled, and how she always knew what to say or not say to make me feel better. Her habit of pulling her dark hair back with a scarf, the outlines of her hands, the cracks and torn skin of her fingertips. The way her limbs looked through dark water where daylight did not reach.

Outside the sky changed and dimmed down, but inside the room it was as if shadows shrank and curled, and the book cast its own sheen, fuller and brighter than the blaze lantern. The slice of blank pages at the end grew slimmer. I summoned the spirits surrounding me and caught them between the covers with all other things lost, until I had scribbled across every last inch of paper and my wrist ached.

When I finally put the pen down and rested my forehead against the leather of the back cover, night was already diminishing outside the curtains. My body felt like an empty husk: light enough for any breeze to carry away, free of the weight of water and words.

I put on my tea master’s outfit. It was loose and soft on my skin, and I felt the unwashed scent of my own sweat on it. My socks were slippery against the wooden floor when I walked to the kitchen with the notebook in my hand. The lightweight fabric pouch was in the kitchen cupboard where I had left it. I loosened the string holding it closed and looked inside. A few spoonfuls of tea remained at the bottom, the same one I had chosen at the Kuoloyarvi market for my graduation ceremony. The scent was fainter than back then, but I could still sense the same flow in it: the moistness reviving the dust of the earth, the wind shaking the branches of all things that grew, the light wavering on water.

I lifted the final waterskin from the floor. Its small weight sloshed quietly. I placed the mouth of the skin against the metal of the tap. 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.

There are seven times seven vertical lines on the door of my house, and the paint of the blue circle outside has dried a long time ago.

Everything is ready now.

This morning the world is the way we left it, and yet I did not recognise it immediately when I opened the door and stepped into the garden. Not only the colour was different, but also the scent, and the silence: I know many silences, but this one was unfamiliar.

For a moment I thought I had been born again.

I wrapped the shawl tighter and pulled the sleeve ends of my cardigan to cover my hands. I could have stepped down from the veranda with my shoes and socks on, but I wanted to know how the icy grass would feel under my bare feet. The stalks rustled and their paper-crisp coldness cut through me when I walked to the rock garden.

The sun came out from behind the cloud and I was dazzled. I had imagined the brightness of past-world winters, but this brightness was different. A delicate layer of snow rested on the branches of the tea plants and on the grass and in the folds of the sand of the rock garden, and on tree leaves and the roof of the teahouse. When the light fell on it, my eyes watered, and I had to close them.

All waterskins on the veranda were empty. White frost covered their scratched sides. I carried the final skin from the kitchen to the veranda of the teahouse, picked up the broomstick and swept from the stone slabs the white-veined ghosts of leaves that were slowly beginning to get soggy in the sun. I selected a handful 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.

The visitors’ entrance was narrow and angular around me as I crawled through it into the teahouse, pushing the waterskin ahead of me. I emptied the water into the cauldron and went to get some dried peat from the shed. In the water room I pulled the tea master’s book from under my cardigan and placed it on the floor under a shelf reserved for the teaware. I put a large metal pot, a smaller earthenware pot and a single teacup next to each other on a tray. I carried the tray to the edge of the hearth, sprinkled the remaining leaves from the pouch into the earthenware pot and started a fire under the cauldron.

I thought of my father, who was only in my blood and bones, and of my mother, of whom nothing remained but me.

I thought of Sanja.

I knew, like in a dream you know that the other person in the room is familiar, even if you don’t know their face, or like you know you love.

Steam began to rise from the cauldron, and I waited until I could count ten small bubbles at the bottom of it.

I filled the metal pot with hot water, prepared the mild tea in the earthenware pot and used it to warm the cup. Then I filled the small teapot again and poured the tea from the cup over it, until the brown, porous sides were wet. My movements flowed unforced, supple as a tree bending in the wind or a wave crossing the oceanbed.

The tea was clear and pale in the cup, its scent soft around me.

I slid the door open for the one who was coming, and settled in the middle of the teahouse floor, so I could see through the doorframe the trees arching over the path and the light sprinkled by the sun on the smooth, moist stones.

This is not the ending I imagined for myself. Yet it is the only one I have. Or that may not be entirely true: I suppose I could run through the gate and continue running until I heard a bang cutting through the air and felt a sharp burn somewhere in my body. Perhaps that would be quicker than waiting for the soldiers who must be drawing closer now, the blades of their sabres, the blood I will not see drying on the stone slabs. But it would only change the journey, not the outcome. There is no way out. Yet I have decided to keep breathing for as long as I can. I may end here, but there will be others who will carry the story forward. Perhaps some small stretch of the world will be more whole after them.

The ceremony is over when there is no more water.

I can’t see beyond this garden. I don’t know if cities have crumbled down, and I don’t know who calls the land their own today. I don’t know who is trying to confine the water and sky without realising that they belong to everyone and no one at all. There are no man-made chains that will hold them.

I don’t need to see beyond this garden, not anymore.

Very soon now, as long as I’m still alone in the teahouse, I will go into the water room, push my hand under the shelf and feel around until I find a small dent in the floorboard resting in the corner. It’s one of the boards from the old teahouse, darker than others. I will push my finger into the dent and lift the board, which is not nailed in place. I will wedge my other hand carefully under it, until I manage to move the board aside. Under it there is a dark niche which emanates the coldness of the earth.

The leather cover of the book is soft and warm, almost like a living thing under my touch. No one will see me place the book carefully into the niche through the hole and push it a little to the side, under the solid floorboards, so the fingers or eyes of a seeker would not catch it.

The visitor is opening the gate right now, stepping into the garden through it, looking for the path that leads to the teahouse. Her feet don’t leave marks in the thin snow. A wind rises and the tea plants shake shimmering dust from their branches. Luminous flakes float into the ground, where snow is already melting into flowing water, threading its narrow brook in light. I follow them as they take their place, deep, deep in the stream, where there is no beginning and no end.

The aftertaste of the tea is sweet in my mouth.

I have tried not to think about Sanja, but she bleeds into my thoughts, and I wonder: do I bleed into hers, into what may be left of her?

This image emerges before my eyes uninvited, and emerges again, and will not vanish: she is standing in the fell cave by the pond. She is looking into the foaming water, and I would like to think she is coming to me. Yet I see another her, turning away from me, and she is not coming back. I don’t know which one of them is real and which one is a reflection in clear water, so sharp that one might almost mistake it for real.

I can pick my own ending, the one I want.

The day outside is burning bright, and in the frame of the doorway I see her as she steps closer to me.

I reach my hand out to her.