The Second Water

by William Withering, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

The proofs came back from the printer in Siilinjärvi on the last Tuesday in May, and Heikki Rautio laid them out along the long table in the village hall, one page to a chair-width, from the soups at the door end to the cakes at the window. There were ninety-six pages. The village association of Kaitajärvi had voted in February to make a cookbook, and three hundred copies were to be ready for the summer market on the first Saturday of July, at twenty euros each, the money for the roof.

"You were a pharmacist," Heikki said. "You'll see what I don't. Commas. Grams where people have written cups."

Marjatta Kivelä took her reading glasses from her cardigan pocket and began at the soups. She had worked thirty-four years in the pharmacy in Kuopio and eleven since in retirement, and she read a page the way she had read a prescription: once for what it said, once for what it would do.

The cabbage soup was sound. The fish pie had lost a line of its method between the manuscript and the proof, and she marked it. The rye bread gave an oven temperature of 25 degrees, which would have made a very slow loaf. She marked that too.

On page forty-one was a photograph of a blue enamel pan, and beneath it: Raili Tervo — Grandmother's False Morel Sauce.

She read it twice.

Clean the korvasieni well, they hold sand. Boil them in a big pan until the smell goes, pour off the water. Chop, fry in butter with an onion, add cream and a little flour, salt and white pepper. Serve with new potatoes. This is how my grandmother made it at Tervola farm every May and we have eaten it for as long as I remember.

"Something?" Heikki said.

"Not a comma," Marjatta said. "Let me finish the rest and I'll come back to it."

She did finish the rest, because it would have been a poor sort of attention that went through the other fifty-five pages without looking at them. Then she came back to page forty-one, and she did not mark it, and she asked Heikki when the corrections had to go to the printer.

"Friday noon. They're doing us cheap because it's between two bigger jobs."

"I'll bring you this page on Thursday," she said.

---

At home she took from the drawer of the kitchen table a school exercise book with a green cover. On the inside of the cover, in a hand now seventeen years younger, she had written: Korvasieni. Every meal I hear of. What was done and what followed.

The first entry was her own house.

Case I. May 2009. Toivo K., aged 63, about 90 kg. Fresh mushrooms from the clear-cut beyond the Hakala road, perhaps 600 g. Boiled twice by T. himself, five minutes each, in plenty of water, the water thrown away. Kitchen window shut; it was cold and raining. T. stood over the pan both times. Eaten by T. and by me, a moderate portion each. I: no symptoms. T.: that evening, a severe headache, then vomiting, three times in the night. No fever. Better by afternoon of the next day. Ate nothing more of it. It was not the eating. I ate the same and was well. It was the steam. He was poisoned at the stove, not at the table. The water was changed correctly; the air was not.

She had not written my husband. She had written Toivo K., as she would have written anyone, because the book was not a diary, and because she had known on that wet night, sitting up while he was sick into the washing-up bowl, that if she did not write it as a case she would remember it as a fright, and a fright teaches nothing but avoidance.

There were thirty-eight entries.

She had got them as a pharmacist gets things: across the counter, in the queue at the shop, at the summer market where the korvasieni were sold in paper bags with the warning slip the law required, and where women who had bought them since before there was a law would read the slip aloud to one another in the voice of a school inspector and laugh. People told her what they had cooked and how, because she asked, and because it was known that she had asked for years and had never once said you fool.

Most of the cases were dull. That was what she valued them for.

Case VII. May 2011. Aune R., aged about 70. Dried mushrooms from the previous year, soaked overnight, boiled once "a long time". Eaten by Aune and her sister. Neither unwell.

Case XII. May 2013. The Hakala household, four adults. Fresh, boiled twice, window open, water thrown out of doors. Eaten twice in one week. No one unwell.

Case XIX. May 2016. Pentti T., aged 58, about 100 kg, and Raili T. Fresh, one boiling, method as her grandmother. One meal. Pentti said he was "a little heavy" in the stomach after; Raili well. Nothing further.

Raili was in the book eleven times. In eleven springs she and Pentti had eaten the sauce made her grandmother's way, one water, and on the one occasion when Pentti was a little heavy in the stomach he had also eaten a good deal of pork at a confirmation party the same afternoon. Marjatta had written that down too, under Case XIX, because it was true and because a case that makes against your argument is still a case.

If she had only Raili's eleven springs, she would have had to say: here is a method that has not harmed the people who used it. She would have had to say that plainly and leave the page alone.

She did not have only those.

Case XXIII. May 2018. Joonas R., aged 9, about 30 kg, staying at his grandmother's (Aune R., see VII) in the school holidays. Fresh mushrooms, one boiling. Sauce eaten on the Saturday and, the rest of it warmed, on the Sunday. The boy had a larger portion the second day because he liked it. Monday: vomiting, very tired, would not get up. Tuesday: whites of the eyes yellow. Taken to Kuopio University Hospital. Liver values raised. Given vitamin B6 by drip, kept four days. Recovered fully; I had this from his mother in September, who said the doctors asked more questions about the mushrooms than she could answer. Aune R. unwell on neither day. Same pan, same method, same two days. The grandmother about 65 kg, the boy about 30. Weight for weight, he had taken perhaps four times her dose on the Sunday alone, and she had eaten it every spring of her life. He had never eaten it before.

Case XXXI. May 2021. A summer couple from Espoo in the Lehtonen cottage, and their daughter, aged 6. Bought fresh at the market. Had "read online" to boil them. Boiled once for two or three minutes. The child ate some. The mother telephoned the Poison Information Centre that night because the child was vomiting; was told to go to the emergency department. Child kept overnight, sent home. They did not know there was anything to know. The slip was in the bag. It went in the bin with the bag.

She sat with the book open at the kitchen table until the light went orange on the lake and then grey.

It was not a large finding. She had never pretended to herself that it was. Thirty-eight meals in one village, told to her second-hand, the weights of the mushrooms guessed, the weights of the people guessed, the number of minutes a thing had boiled given by people who had not been watching the clock. A doctor would have smiled at it, kindly. She would have smiled at it herself, if someone else had brought it to her across the counter.

But it said one thing, and it said it more than once. The grown people who had eaten the sauce all their lives, once in a spring, from one water, had come to no harm she could find. The trouble came to the small, to the ones who ate it two days running, to the ones who had never eaten it before, and to the ones who stood over the steam. The grandmother's method was not a poison. It was a dose. And the dose had been kept, for a hundred years, not in the recipe but in the grandmother.

She had read, the winter before, the Food Authority's report that even two waters leave something like a fifth of the poison in the mushroom. That had not surprised her. Nothing about the plant had ever promised to be clean.

What she turned over, and turned over again, was the three hundred copies.

---

She went to Raili on the Wednesday morning, with a bag of rhubarb as an excuse and the green book in the bag under it.

Raili was in the garden, on her knees at the carrot bed, and she said "Coffee's on" without getting up, which meant she had seen Marjatta coming along the shore path. They had known each other since Raili's daughters were at school with Marjatta's son. They had sat together at Toivo's funeral and at Pentti's hip operation and on a great many benches.

In the kitchen Marjatta put the rhubarb on the draining board and the proof of page forty-one on the oilcloth.

"Heikki's shown you," Raili said. "Isn't the picture good? That's Mummo's pan."

"It's a very good picture."

"But."

Marjatta had spent a long time the evening before deciding what order to say things in, and she found now that the order did not matter much, because Raili was watching her face and not listening to the words.

"Raili, how did your grandmother cook them? Not the recipe. The kitchen."

"What do you mean, the kitchen? On the stove."

"Which stove?"

Raili thought. "The summer kitchen," she said. "Out in the yard. The little house with the iron range. Mummo did all the smelly things out there, fish and the korvasieni. Mother too, when we still had it."

"With the door open?"

"There wasn't a door, most of the summer. There was a curtain for the flies." She put her cup down. "What is this?"

"And the children. Did the children have the sauce?"

"The children had the potatoes," Raili said slowly, "with the butter off the top of the pan. Mummo said the sauce was too rich for children. Marjatta. What is this?"

"And never two days."

"You didn't keep it. What would you keep it for, it's cream, it goes." Raili sat back. "You think Mummo was poisoning us."

"I think your grandmother knew exactly what she was doing," Marjatta said, "and I think none of it is on this page."

She took out the green book. She did not open it at Joonas. She opened it at the first page, and turned it round, and pushed it across the oilcloth, and let Raili read about Toivo.

Raili read. It took a while; the handwriting was small.

"I remember that," she said. "You said he'd had a bug."

"I said that at the time because I didn't know. By Thursday I knew." Marjatta turned the page back towards herself. "He boiled them twice, Raili. Two waters. We did it by the slip. We did everything the slip says except open the window, because it doesn't say open the window, it says ensure good ventilation, and it was raining, and we thought the extractor was ventilation. It isn't. Your grandmother had a curtain for the flies and a yard, and I had a kitchen with the window shut."

"So it's the steam," Raili said. "Not the mushroom."

"It's both. It's the mushroom that makes the steam." She turned to Case XXIII and did give it to her then. "That's Aune's grandson. One water. The same way as yours."

Raili read that too. She knew the family; she would have heard about the hospital at the time, and she would not have heard it this way, with the weights.

"Aune's cooked them like that for fifty years," she said.

"Yes. It says so. Look." Marjatta found Case VII, and showed her. "I wrote down every time it was fine. There are a lot more of those than the others. That's the truth of it, and if you want the truth of it in the cookbook, then all of it goes in, not half. I'm not asking Heikki to take the page out."

"What are you asking?"

"For the rest of your grandmother's recipe."

---

It was, in the end, only four lines, but it took them the length of a pot of coffee and the next pot, and at one point Raili got up and went out to the carrots again and was out there for twenty minutes, and Marjatta washed the cups and did not follow her.

When Raili came back in she had soil on her knees and she said, "It'll read as if she didn't know how to cook."

"It will read as if she knew something the rest of us have to be told."

"People from Helsinki will buy that book."

"Yes," Marjatta said. "That is what I've been thinking about since Tuesday."

Raili stood at the window. Down at the shore the Lehtonen cottage had its shutters off already; the summer people came earlier every year.

"When Mummo made it," she said, "you had to stand in the yard and wait. We used to hang about the curtain, and she'd say, go and play, it isn't ready. She threw the water on the midden. Not in the sink. On the midden, and she'd stand back from it." She turned round. "I've always done it in the kitchen. I've done it in that kitchen with the fan on."

"You and Pentti are big, and you've eaten it every year of your lives, and you've never kept it."

"Pentti's not as big as he was." She sat down. "Write it, then. You write it. You'll get it right."

"No," Marjatta said. "It's your grandmother's recipe. You write it, and I'll tell you if the numbers are wrong."

---

On Thursday afternoon she gave Heikki the proof of page forty-one with a sheet of paper clipped to it in Raili's handwriting. He read it standing up, by the window, where the light was.

Boil the korvasieni twice, five minutes each time, in plenty of water, three times as much water as mushroom. Throw each water away outside, not down the sink, and rinse the mushrooms after each. Cook with the window and the door open, or outside, and do not lean over the pan: the steam is poisonous too. Mummo made this in the summer kitchen in the yard. She did not give the sauce to children; they had the potatoes. Do not keep it to eat the next day. Even boiled properly some poison stays in, so this is a spring dish, once or twice, not a thing to eat all through May.

"That's a lot of words for a sauce," Heikki said.

"It's a lot of mushroom for a child."

He looked at her over the paper. He was a kind man, and he had been a woodwork teacher for thirty years, and he knew that some instructions were long because the saw was sharp.

"It won't fit under the photograph," he said.

"Then make the photograph smaller."

"It's a nice photograph."

"It is," Marjatta said. "It's her pan. Nobody will mind if it's smaller."

He went to the printer's email on his phone and began typing with one finger. Raili had telephoned at nine the night before, from the jetty by the sound of it, to tell her how it had gone, and she had written it on the back of an envelope. Marjatta sat down at the long table, where the proofs had been cleared away, and took the green book out of her bag, and turned to the next clean page.

Case XXXIX. May 2026. Raili T., aged 69, and Pentti T., aged 72. Fresh, from the burnt ground behind Tervola. Boiled twice, five minutes each, in the big pan on a camping stove at the end of the jetty, Raili upwind. Both waters thrown on the compost. One meal, no leftovers. Granddaughter (aged 7) visiting: had new potatoes and butter. Neither unwell.

She read it over, as she read everything, once for what it said and once for what it would do. Then she drew a line under it, and left the rest of the page for next year.

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem quīntum Kalendās Octōbrēs (27 September 2026), ā Guilielmō Witheringō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

William Withering, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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