Memory of Water. Emmi Itaranta

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       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 СКАЧАТЬ