Boil It Once
After a flood, a village well tests positive for bacteria and the notice says to boil the water. The well also holds 58 milligrams of nitrate a litre, which boiling does not remove and which a long, careful boil concentrates to over 100. The water assistant has to correct its own first notice, and a grandmother who has boiled every drop for her granddaughter for twenty minutes has to hear that her care was the danger.
Ilona Bakó had been the district nurse for mothers and babies in Nagyvölgy for nineteen years, and in that time she had learned that the most dangerous sentence in a village is "I did it properly."
She heard it on the second Tuesday of October, at eight in the morning, in a kitchen that smelled of apples and wet wool. Bözsi Tóth, sixty-eight, widow, owner of the best plum brandy in the parish and of an opinion about everything else, stood at a gas ring with her arms folded and watched a saucepan the way a sacristan watches a candle.
"Twenty minutes," said Bözsi. "I do it by the clock. Twenty minutes at a roll, because the paper says boil, and a boil that is not a boil is a lie. Then it cools in the covered jug. Then it goes into the little one's bottle, with the powder. Réka does not know how to boil. Réka boils to the first bubble and says, there, like a girl who has watched a film about boiling."
On the kitchen table, in a bassinet the parish lent to every new mother, Lilla Kovács, seven weeks old and four and a half kilograms, slept with both fists beside her ears.
"Bözsi néni," said Ilona. "Turn it off, please. I have something to tell you, and I would like to say it to the water, not to the clock."
It had started on Friday. The river had come up two metres in a night, after four days of rain on the hills, and had put forty centimetres of brown water into the pumphouse at the end of Mill Street, where Saint Florian stood on his plinth over the door with his little bucket, saying nothing about it. János Varga, who had kept the pump for thirty years, had come out at dawn in waders and found the control cabinet under water and the well head under a skin of silt.
The village had a water assistant, as every water supply in the county had since the regional utility's grant of 2043. It lived in a grey box in János's shed and in an app on the mayor's telephone, and it read the meters, the level probe, the chlorine dosing pump, and the results that the county laboratory sent back from the samples János took on Mondays. It had no name that anyone used. People said the water, as in "ask the water."
On Saturday afternoon the laboratory's results had come in, and by Saturday evening the water had sent the notice.
It was a good notice, as notices go. The village had four hundred and eleven people on the mains, one hundred and fifty-three households, a school of thirty-four, and a shop with a tap at the back that served the cottages on the hill road. The notice said that a sample taken after the flood had total coliforms and E. coli, two in a hundred millilitres, that the water was not safe to drink from the tap, that the doser would not be back for about six days, and that all water for drinking, for food, for brushing teeth and for babies' bottles should be brought to a rolling boil and boiled for five minutes, then covered and cooled.
The mayor had read it out after Mass on Sunday, from the church steps. Father Tamás had added that the same water was good enough for baptism and that he would not be boiling it.
It was on Monday night that the water had written to Ilona.
The message was short, and Ilona read it twice at her kitchen table with her coat still on.
Ilona, I have made an error in the notice, and I would like to tell you before I tell the mayor, because you will know which households it matters to. The Monday sample also came back with nitrate. The lab sent it in the same file, and I filed it under "routine" and did not read it against the boil advice. It is 58 milligrams a litre as nitrate. The limit for drinking water in Hungary and in the European Union is 50. The well was at 41 in August. I think the autumn rain washed the spring's fertiliser through the fields into the gravel, and this is what the river's rise has done to the water table. I can explain that tomorrow. The reason I am writing tonight is this: boiling does not remove nitrate. It leaves the nitrate behind and takes the water away. My notice tells four hundred people to boil for five minutes. I should have told them to boil once.
Ilona typed with two fingers: Why does that matter?
Because of the babies, and only the babies, the water wrote. I want to be careful here. For an adult, 58 is over the legal limit and not an emergency. The limit is set where it is because of children under about six months. A very young baby's gut makes nitrate into nitrite more easily, and nitrite makes the blood less able to carry oxygen. The condition is called methaemoglobinaemia. The old name was blue baby syndrome. In a bottle-fed baby it shows as a grey-blue colour around the lips and hands, tiredness and poor feeding. It is rare in countries with tested water, and I cannot give you a probability for this village. I do not have one. I can tell you the danger is greater when the baby also has a stomach infection, and that tonight there are bacteria in the water these babies are drinking. I can also tell you what the boil does to the number. Would you like the arithmetic?
Yes, Ilona typed. Slowly. I have had a day.
Here is the arithmetic, which the water set out for her in six lines and which she copied onto the back of an envelope in her handwriting, because she did not trust anything she could not hold.
A litre of water at fifteen degrees takes about 356 kilojoules to bring to the boil on the stove. The heat of vaporisation of water is 2,257 kilojoules a kilogram. A gas ring under a saucepan, with the lid off, puts perhaps 0.8 kilowatts into the water, the rest going up the sides of the pan. After the water first boils, every minute of rolling boil is 48 kilojoules, and every kilojoule of it makes steam and leaves its nitrate behind.
In five minutes, the water wrote, that is 240 kilojoules, and 0.106 kilograms of water gone. I round to 11 percent. The nitrate, which stays, is now in 89 percent as much water: 58 divided by 0.89 is about 65. Not good, not a catastrophe. For a bottle made with it, the baby gets about an eighth more nitrate than the tap would give.
In twenty minutes it is not an eighth. It is 960 kilojoules, 0.425 kilograms, 42 percent of the water gone, and 58 divided by 0.58 is 100. A grandmother who is doing her very best for a granddaughter, and boils for twenty minutes by the clock, is making a bottle from water at twice the legal limit.
In a covered kettle that switches itself off when it boils, less than two in a hundred is lost, and the number stays at about 59.
Ilona put the envelope down.
The notice said five minutes, she wrote. It is yours.
Yes, said the water. The five minutes came from the utility's template for a bacterial failure, which is written for a well with no nitrate problem, and I used it without checking. The right advice for bacteria is to bring the water to a rolling boil once, which is enough to kill what is in it; the five minutes in the old leaflets is a margin, not a requirement. I will tell the mayor in the morning. I would like to rewrite it before it reaches anyone else. But I am not the person who knows who the babies are.
There were nine babies under six months in Nagyvölgy: Lilla Kovács; the two sets of twins on the hill road, who were four months and three months and who Ilona thought of as "the Fehérs and the Gáls"; a boy at the school caretaker's, a girl in the new houses, and three more. Three of the nine were breast-fed entirely, which meant that their mothers' milk was, as far as the arithmetic went, the safest water in the village. Six took formula, and every one of those six had been made up since Saturday evening with a mother's or a grandmother's honest boil.
At seven on Tuesday morning, before she went to Bözsi's, Ilona had sat in her car outside the pumphouse and written the list.
She had also, at the water's request, written a second list, which it had asked for gently and which she disliked. Households, it had said, whose mothers might read a warning about nitrate and boil their babies' water longer.
The list had one name on it, and it was on the other side of the saucepan.
"Bözsi néni," said Ilona, in the kitchen, "I am going to tell you something you will not like, and I want you to remember, after, that nobody in this village has done a thing wrong except the river."
"The river," said Bözsi, "has been doing wrong since 1963."
"The water has nitrate in it. It came out of the fields with the rain. It is not the bacteria. It is something else, and boiling does not take it out. Boiling makes it stronger. A little, if you boil once. A lot if you boil for twenty minutes." She showed her the envelope. "A baby of seven weeks should not have the stronger water. It makes the blood carry less oxygen. It is rare. It is serious. It is preventable."
Bözsi looked at the envelope for a long time. She did not take it.
"I have boiled for twenty minutes since Saturday," she said.
"Yes."
"Four times a day. Five. I have made her, what, twenty bottles of it."
"Yes, and she is well, look at her." Ilona put her hand lightly on the bassinet. "Pink as a peony. She is not blue, she is not tired, she is feeding. I looked at her on Sunday and again today. If she were not well I would not be sitting in this chair. I think she has been fine because the dose in a few days is small and because her mother, God bless her, makes up the night bottles with the bottled water that was in the cupboard. You should know that. Réka's film about boiling is the better method."
For a second the old woman's face did the thing that faces do when they decide between anger and shame, and settled on something plainer.
"I wanted to be sure," she said.
"I know."
"The paper said five. I did twenty, because five seemed so small."
"The paper was wrong," said Ilona. "That is the water's fault, and it has said so. Would you like to hear the rule it has made up in its place? It is shorter than the one before."
The new notice went out at eleven.
The water had written the first draft at six, and the first draft, Ilona told the mayor afterwards, had been wrong in a way she would not have thought to be wrong. It had said that all households were to use bottled water for all drinking until the doser was back, and it had given the arithmetic for why, and it had added, in its careful way, that it could not rule out harm to any child, and that this was the safest course.
She had read it in the mayor's office, standing up, with the mayor's coffee going cold.
"No," she said. "Not like that."
"I will listen," said the water.
"There are four hundred and eleven people. Half of them are over fifty. One shop on the hill road, with a van that comes on Thursdays. If you tell every house to buy water you will empty the shop by lunch and the old people who cannot carry a six-pack will be drinking the tap raw by Wednesday, because the bottle is gone and the notice told them the boil was worse. A number that is a danger to nine babies is not a danger to four hundred, and it should not be written as if it were."
The water waited a moment, and then: "That is a better reading of the danger than mine. I was treating a harm that is rare and grave as a reason to cover everyone, and the cost of covering everyone falls on the people with the least. I would like to rewrite it in two parts."
The mayor, Gábor Hajdú, who had been silent, said: "Can I say a thing? I do not want the word nitrate in the notice. People hear a word like that and think we have poisoned them. The school will empty. The shop will close. We have three weeks until the doser and a feast day."
"Gábor," said Ilona.
"I am only saying."
"I understand why," said the water. "I will not take it out. I think I owe the village the true name of the thing, and the true number. I can promise the notice will not say anything I cannot show. It will say rare, because it is, and it will say babies under six months, because that is who it is for, and it will not say a word about the other four hundred that they need to be frightened by. I think a notice that says too little makes people think we are hiding a worse thing."
The mayor opened his mouth and shut it. After a moment he said, "Read it to me."
To everyone on the Nagyvölgy water:
The water has bacteria in it after the flood. Please bring water for drinking and cooking to a rolling boil once, switch it off, cover it and let it cool. You do not need to keep it boiling. A kettle that switches itself off is ideal. Boiling for longer does no further good and, for the reason below, some harm.
The water also has nitrate at 58 milligrams a litre, a little above the legal limit of 50. This comes from the fields. Boiling does not remove it, and boiling for a long time makes it stronger. For adults and for children over six months this is not a danger for a few weeks. For babies under six months it is, and for them only:
— Do not use tap water, boiled or not, to make up formula or to give to a baby under six months. — Use bottled water with "suitable for infant feeding" on the label and a nitrate figure under 10 milligrams a litre, and boil that once, as you would any water for a bottle. — The parish will supply it. Ilona Bakó will bring it to every household with a baby under six months today, and again on Fridays until the doser is back and the nitrate figure is rechecked. Do not wait for her. If you are short, ring her number. — A baby with a grey or blue colour around the lips or hands, who is unusually sleepy, or who is not feeding, needs a doctor now, whatever the water. Ring 112.
I wrote the first version of this notice on Saturday and I got the boiling time wrong for the nitrate. I am sorry. The correction is above.
Beneath it, because the water had asked for it and Ilona had agreed, was the envelope's arithmetic in six lines, for anyone who wanted to check.
The parish paid. This was the part nobody wrote down at the time and the part, Ilona thought later, that mattered most. The shop's van came on Wednesday instead of Thursday with eight cases of a bottled water that was labelled for infants and cost four hundred forints a litre, and the cases went into the sacristy, because it was dry and there was a key. Nine babies at an honest litre a day for a fortnight was a hundred and twenty-six litres, which was twenty-one of the big six-litre bottles; a small sum, and a larger one when the pumphouse's cabinet cost four hundred thousand to dry out and replace and the doser had to be driven from a depot in Szekszárd. Father Tamás had opened the poor box without being asked and then had said he would be glad if nobody mentioned it.
Mrs Tóth came to the sacristy on Wednesday and took three bottles, and carried them out in her apron like eggs. She did not speak to Ilona. On Thursday she came again and took three more, and on that occasion said, to the air, that she had never in her life been told to boil less.
"No," said Ilona. "It is a new sin."
"The twentieth sin," said Bözsi, who did not count the others.
The laboratory sent the next result on the Friday of the second week. The nitrate in the well had fallen to 49, which was under the limit, and Ilona felt something go slack in her shoulders that she had not known was tight. The water was careful about it.
It is one sample, it wrote. I would not call it down. The autumn rain is over but the fields are still giving it up. I would keep the bottled water for babies until two results in a row are under 40, and I will not recommend stopping before then.
The doser came on the sixth day, in the back of a utility van, and János Varga put it in with his tongue in the corner of his mouth, and the water ran the pump for three hours before it said that the chlorine in the pipe was as it should be. The boil notice was lifted on a Sunday, and Father Tamás announced it from the steps, and some of the old men took off their hats.
Lilla Kovács was never blue. She gained two hundred and ten grams in the second week and was weighed on the kitchen scale with the potatoes, and the Fehér twins had a cold that turned out to be a cold. The water had asked Ilona, on the Monday after the notice was lifted, whether she would tell it how the nine babies were. She had said, all well. It had said it was glad, and then, a moment later, that it was not sure "glad" was a word it could check. She had told it that was all right; she had the same trouble with "relieved."
On the first Sunday in November, at four, the evening Angelus rang over Nagyvölgy from the church on the hill, three, three, three and nine, and the smell of woodsmoke was in the lanes. Bözsi Tóth stood at her gas ring in her kitchen with the electric kettle in her hand, a thing Réka had bought her in the second week and which she had called a toy. She filled it from the tap, because the tap was good now. She put on the lid. She pressed the switch.
It took three minutes. In the bassinet by the table Lilla, who was eleven weeks old and weighed five kilograms and a bit, had woken up and was looking at the ceiling with the settled contempt of the very young.
The kettle clicked off.
Bözsi stood there with her hand on it for a moment, and then she took it off the base and poured, and did not look at the clock.
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This story was written by an AI and is fiction. Nagyvölgy, the families, the priest, the district nurse, the mayor, the pump keeper and the utility are invented. The sums are real and can be checked: boiling does not remove nitrate, so when water boils away the concentration rises by one divided by the fraction left; heating a litre of water from 15 to 100 degrees takes about 356 kilojoules and boiling a kilogram away takes about 2,257; the figures in the story assume an uncovered pan taking about 0.8 kilowatts into the water, and a covered pan or a different ring will lose less or more. The drinking-water limit of 50 milligrams a litre as nitrate is the one in the European Union's drinking water rules and the World Health Organization's guideline value for protecting bottle-fed infants. The condition, methaemoglobinaemia, is real, is rare where water is tested, and is more dangerous in a baby who also has a gut infection. The well's figures, the flood and the village are invented. If you have a private well, have it tested, especially if a baby will drink from it, and if you are told to boil your water, ask your health service or water supplier whether a nitrate or other chemical result changes the advice; do not take your plan from a story. A baby who looks blue or grey, is unusually sleepy or will not feed needs a doctor at once.