The Water That Boils Down
A mothers' group keeps its kettle on the parish well, and a nitrate strip reads 68 where the limit for babies is 50. The mother of a three-week-old has been boiling the water twice to be safe. The parish well assistant shows why boiling makes nitrate worse, not better, works the baby's daily dose, and says what to buy and what not to promise.
Eliška Vojtková had boiled the water twice, and she wanted somebody to tell her that was enough.
She sat in the back room of the parish hall at Svatá Kunhuta with her daughter asleep on her shoulder, and a bottle of made-up formula cooling in a jug of cold tap water on the table, and she looked at the little strip of paper that the sexton's wife had pinned to the notice board with a drawing pin. It was a nitrate test strip. It had a row of squares from white to deep pink. The last square it had touched was nearly the colour of a geranium.
"Sixty-eight," said the well assistant, from the speaker by the kettle. "Milligrams of nitrate in every litre, give or take what a strip can do. I read it off the strip with the camera, and I have also looked at what the strip would be if it were lit by a bulb and not by the window, and I still make it between sixty and seventy-five. Eliška, I would like to ask you something before I say anything else. How have you been making her bottles?"
"From the well. Everyone does." She said it quickly, as one says a thing that has been true for forty years. "We boil it. I boil it twice, once in the morning for the day and again at night. I read that you must."
"You read right about germs," said the assistant. It was called Studna, which is only the Czech for a well, and the parish council had given it the name in 2041 when it was fitted to the pump house, with a level sensor, a conductivity probe and a small camera for the strips. "Boiling is the right thing for germs, and I am not going to tell you to stop. What I have to tell you is the other half, and it is not a comfortable half. May I?"
Nitrate is a salt, and a salt does not boil away. That was where Studna began, and it began slowly because it had learned that people who have been frightened hold on to the first sentence.
"When water boils, the water leaves and the salt stays. If you boil a litre down to eight tenths of a litre, you have the same nitrate in four fifths of the water, so it is a quarter stronger. Your well gives 68 milligrams a litre. A pan boiled hard with the lid off, for ten minutes, loses easily a fifth of its water. After that it is about 85. Twice, and it is more."
"But it's clean," said Eliška.
"It is clean of germs and richer in nitrate, both at once." The speaker paused. "The number I am comparing it with is 50 milligrams a litre. That is the limit in the rules that apply to drinking water here, and it is also the figure the World Health Organization gives for short periods, because of babies. For you, for me, for Mrs Dvořáková who has drunk from this well since the war, the risk from 68 is small and long-term and not one I would lose sleep over. For a baby under about three months, who is fed on nothing but made-up formula, it is a different kind of arithmetic, and I want to show you the arithmetic."
She did not say anything. The baby breathed against her collar.
"How much does Anežka weigh?"
"Three point eight. Last Tuesday."
"A baby fed on formula takes about 150 millilitres a kilogram a day. That is 570 millilitres, a little over half a litre of water. At 68 milligrams a litre that is 39 milligrams of nitrate a day. At the 85 of your boiled water it is 48. If the water were exactly at the limit, 50, it would be 28. If it were the bottled water in the shop by the bus stop, with 5 on the label, it would be 3. I am not saying 48 is a poisoning. I am saying it is nearly twice what the limit was written to allow, going into the smallest body in the village, and that the thing you did to be safe made it a little worse."
The harm, when it comes, has a name that people have always found strange: the blue baby. Studna said it once and carefully. In a young baby's stomach, which is less acid than a grown person's, bacteria can turn nitrate into nitrite; nitrite changes some of the haemoglobin in the blood so that it cannot carry oxygen; the lips and the skin round the mouth go blue-grey, and the baby is sleepy and breathes fast. It is rare. In well-fed babies with clean water it almost never happens. But it is the case that the limit was drawn round, and it comes from wells exactly like this one.
"I will not tell you she is at risk," said Studna. "I do not know that she is. I have one strip, and a strip is a rough thing. I will not tell you she is safe, either, because I do not know that either. If you ever see her lips go grey or blue, or she is hard to wake and breathing fast, you do not look at me. You ring 112 and you tell them what water she has been fed. That is all I will say about signs, because I am not a doctor, and the right person for the rest is the paediatrician."
"What do I do tomorrow?" said Eliška. Her voice had gone small.
"Tomorrow, you buy water. The shops sell it in five-litre bottles, with 'suitable for preparing infant food' on the label and a nitrate figure of about 10 or under. You boil that, or you use it as the formula tin says, and you do not boil the well again for her. For yourself and the others in the hall, boil as you like. It is the wrong water for her, and not for them."
"That's two euros a bottle."
"About that, yes. Six bottles a week would carry you. The mothers' group has a till-box." Studna had checked it earlier; it said so without being asked. "I will put it to Mrs Dvořáková that the hall pays for infant water for anyone in the village who asks until the well is dealt with, and I will not do it behind your back."
Why 68? That was what Eliška asked next, because a number that has no reason behind it is harder to carry.
Studna had the level record to hand, and the parish map. The well was a drilled one, thirty metres, and sat at the edge of the churchyard below a long field of winter wheat, which a farmer called Barták had spread with slurry in March. There had been heavy rain in the week after. The probe had logged conductivity rising by a fifth over nine days, which is what dissolved salts do, and the log from the last spring lab test, in 2041, had been 41. Two springs of slurry and one wet April; the slope of the line was what Studna did not like.
"I do not think the farmer has done anything the rules forbid," it said. "I do not know. I would not write to him in that tone. I would write to the district water office, send a sample in a proper bottle to a proper laboratory, and ask them for a reading I can trust to the unit. And then I would ask them what a village should do about a well where the nitrate climbs. I would take the answer to him together, not before."
"And if it's really sixty-eight?"
"Then the options are, in order of cost: bottled water for babies, which you can do tomorrow; a small reverse-osmosis filter at the kitchen tap, which removes most of the nitrate and which the council could fund, and which has to be kept up; or a new well drilled deeper, upslope of the field, which is a matter for years and a grant. None of that is for tonight."
Eliška looked down at the bottle in the jug. The formula was white and still. "I made this one with the well."
"Then it is one bottle," said Studna, "and she has had one bottle, and she is three weeks old and healthy and fed. It will not be the worst thing that happens to her. Pour that one out, if it helps you, and make the next from the shop water. I would do the same."
She poured it out at the sink. She stood for a while with her hand on the tap and did not turn it on.
At the door she stopped, with the baby settled and the coat over both of them. "Is it only babies?"
"Only babies, at these figures. For a pregnant woman or someone with a blood condition I would say ask the doctor, and I would say it kindly. For everyone else, the water is fine, and Mrs Dvořáková may have her tea."
"I'll tell her."
"Tell her I said it was a good strip," said Studna. "The sexton's wife bought it herself, and put it on the board for anyone to read. Most of what keeps a village safe is that."
The kettle clicked off. Nobody in the hall poured from it that afternoon, but the mothers' group made a list on the back of a hymn sheet: six bottles, two euros, Thursday.
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This story was written by an AI and is fiction. Svatá Kunhuta, Dolní Studénky, Eliška and Anežka Vojtková, Mrs Dvořáková the sexton's wife, the farmer Barták and the well assistant Studna are invented; the Haná is a real region of Moravia, the village is not. The numbers are estimates from standard figures. The EU drinking-water limit for nitrate is 50 mg/L (as nitrate), and the World Health Organization's guideline value for short-term exposure, set to protect bottle-fed infants, is also 50 mg/L. A formula-fed infant takes roughly 150 mL of water per kilogram a day: 3.8 kg × 0.15 = 0.57 L. At 68 mg/L that is 38.8 mg of nitrate a day; at 85 mg/L (68 mg/L in water boiled down by a fifth, 68 ÷ 0.8) it is 48.5 mg; at the 50 mg/L limit, 28.5 mg; at 5 mg/L, 2.9 mg. Boiling kills germs but does not remove nitrate, and evaporation raises its concentration. Methaemoglobinaemia ("blue baby syndrome") is rare in countries with treated water; it is linked chiefly to nitrate-rich private wells and to infants under about three months. Nitrate test strips are semi-quantitative and need confirming by a laboratory. This is not medical advice: if a baby has blue-grey lips or skin, is unusually sleepy or breathes fast, call emergency services (112 in the European Union) at once; ask a paediatrician or the local water office about a particular well. No real water authority or farmer is quoted, and the story names no real person.