Thirteen Steps Underwater

 

1. Lovi

Trains put me in a trance. Memories love the rhythm of the tracks, the flickering darkness between this place and that. They drift to view, charmed by the sway of the battered carriage, revelations that promise to make everything somehow different before you get there.

But you can’t remember further than water. Many have tried, great and small, drunkards, bedwetters, civilisations. The window is black but for the trickles of water, escaping.

Mind the gap, the voice says.

Hydraulic hiss. The rain smells of rust.

I plunge.

 

2. Aino

My mother almost drowned at the age of nine.

Ten years later I was born, and she tried to imprint in me a fear of liquid substances such as water, ambiguous books and alcohol. By doing that, she submerged me in them .

I was born in June, and it was the hottest ever, I’m told. My grandmother was still alive and perhaps the sunshine made her oblivious of the nervous winters, the roar of Russian Sturmoviks and how she ran outside with the other children, how she hid under a white sheet and lay still, snow melting away under her panicky heartbeat. That June, the hottest ever, she probably smiled and heard a fly buzzing against a window. Perhaps she drank water, saw the trees outside and thought: no one ever dies.

That June my mother was nineteen and she held me for the first time in that small town surrounded by treacherous sandbanks and reservoirs, children laughing, jumping into the water with a splash followed by the bubbling silence. Me, just emerged from water. Them, daring each other in shaky voices, competing who could hold breath the longest, one of them drowning.

Those who were and went before us.

I see a young girl with floating hair holding her breath on the 5th of June 1973.

Become water phantoms when remembered .

I’ve never met her, don’t know if she’s still alive.

Phantom limbs of uncertain memories.

If she ever was. Still I remember the flicker of the waves on her hair.

There are people in us without names, birthdays.

My hand looks different the moment I put it below the surface, and again she is there, nestling underwater, dreaming of birth, dying.

 

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