The Ink That Would Not Forget

Songyan Town is folded into the crease between two mountain ridges. Its lanes are narrow, and the blue flagstones have been soaked black and shiny by centuries of rain. Pu Zhibai's old workshop sits at the very back of the last lane. Across its lintel hangs a half-faded board with two characters his late master, Old Gu, once brushed: Keep Silence.

Pu is seventy-three. He has made ink for fifty-eight years. Ink will not be hurried. Pine branches cut from the back mountain are stacked into the smoke house, where the fire is pressed down to a single thread of blue smoke. The soot from burning pine resin settles into compartments lined with hemp paper; every three days he sweeps it up, and the black powder he gathers is called pine soot. He mixes it with musk, camphor, and a glue simmered all night from cowhide, pours it into an iron mortar, and pounds it with a wooden pestle until it draws a thread an inch long. Then he packs it into pearwood molds, presses out the sticks, and when they leave the mold he sets them along the shaded base of the wall for a full hundred days. Through those hundred days they see no sun; the damp is drawn out thread by thread, and only then does the ink settle its temper, grinding smooth instead of gritty. That is the old recipe, passed down from his master's master.

Three days after First Frost this year, he opened a fresh mold—thirty-six sticks, most of them the Pine-Soot Tribute Ink ordered by the town's private school and the local scribes. For the first few days all was well. On the ninth day, crouching at the wall to turn the sticks, he ran a finger across the face of one and felt something wrong. The surface should have been an even, oil-black sheen; yet along the mold's seam a human shape floated faintly—head, shoulders, two arms hanging—as if a shadow had been pressed into the ink.

He wiped it with a damp cloth; it would not come off. He leaned close: the shape showed only when the light struck it slantwise, and vanished if he looked straight on. Pu's heart gave a lurch. He said nothing, and quietly moved that stick to the darkest corner of the wall, hiding it behind the others.

Those days, his granddaughter Pu He came every other day to bring him a meal. The girl is seventeen and sharp-eyed. The first time she saw the stick in the corner, she set her chopsticks on the bowl's edge and stared. Grandfather, she said, why does it look like there's a person curled up inside this ink? Pu took the bowl and stepped in front of her. You're seeing things, he said. What person could be in ink? Eat and go home early; don't go teasing stray cats at the lane's mouth. Pu He asked no more, but after that she walked around that stick every time she came.

Two days later, Mr. Zhou from the school came for his ordered Cangpei Studio ink. As always, Pu ground a stick before the guest to show its quality. He poured half a ladle of clear water into the inkstone, took up a stick, steadied his wrist, and circled it slowly. By the third circle, a face rose on the water.

Not Mr. Zhou's face. It was long and thin, with an old scar at the temple, and the lips opened and closed as if reciting something, then broke off at the crucial line. Pu's hand twitched; the stick struck the rim of the stone with a sharp clink. Mr. Zhou had seen it too. His fine brows knotted. Zhibai, he said, in your pool—

A trick of the water, the reflection, Pu said, tilting the stone, and the face broke apart into nothing but an unsoluble black. He smiled, handed over the wrapped ink, and did not lift his eyes to meet Mr. Zhou's.

That night he did not sleep well. When the lamp oil had burned down, he remembered his master's words on his deathbed, clutching his hand: That old pine on the back mountain—one tenth of the soot in the smoke house comes from it. That tree is not clean. Every time I took from it I burned three sticks of incense and spoke a word first. If you can do without it, do without. He had taken the old man for muddled then. What tree had not held a hanged man?

Before the sky was fully light he groped his way up the back mountain. The smoke house stands on the rear slope; against its wall lay several bundles of pine waiting to be burned. He turned them one by one, and at the very bottom found a bundle of thick, black limbs whose bark bore row after row of horizontal grooves—the marks of rope. His master's old ledger was kept in an iron box under the smoke-house beam; he had carried the key thirty years. He shook the book open. On its yellowed pages, in his master's crooked hand:

Autumn, eleventh year of Guangxu. A man hanged himself on the old back-mountain pine. The dead man's surname was Wen, a licentiate who had failed the exams three times and owed the town's rice shop a debt; on the eve of Mid-Autumn he loosed his own belt from the bough. Since then the pine resin has carried a bitterness. One tenth of the smoke-house soot is taken from this tree. Each time I take, I burn incense and announce myself first. If one day, Zhibai, you see a human shape in the ink, do not be alarmed. It is Scholar Wen come to claim the policy essay he never finished.

Pu closed the ledger; his fingers went cold and numb. He thought of the lips' motion on that face—clearly reciting a policy essay, halted mid-line, as if someone had seized him from behind and cut him off.

He went back to the workshop and moved the whole batch from the wall into the inner room, covering them tight with coarse cloth. But the cloth could not cover it. Lying on his cot at night, he heard from the direction of the wall a sound impossibly faint, like someone reciting—a few lines, a pause, then more. Not the wind; the wind cannot turn into this dead wall. Not rats either; the sound kept its own rhythm of stress and breath, the cadence of prose.

The next day he rose early and built his fire, set that bundle of old pine onto the rack in the smoke house—and in the end did not light it. He stood in the doorway; the sun drew a thread of bitter fragrance from the resin. He had breathed that scent for fifty-eight years, and for the first time it smelled like weeping.

He never dared grind that batch again. When Mr. Zhou came to ask, he said the glue had not yet woken, and to wait a little longer. After the guest left, he sat alone at the wall and watched the sticks dry in their row, the outline of the figure growing clearer day by day, until even the folds of its robe appeared.

On the night of the fifteenth of the ninth month it rained, and he heard the sound at the wall fall silent. He pulled on his clothes and went over. By the moonlight leaking through the window crack, on the foremost stick the figure's mouth was open, as if at last it had spoken the line of the essay it had never finished.

Pu crouched and laid a hand on that stick. It was cold, like touching a wrist not yet gone quite cold. He said nothing, settled the cloth back in place, and returned to his cot.

The next morning he built his fire as usual, burned the soot, pounded the glue, filled the molds. Only that row of ink along the wall he never touched again. They are still there. A hundred days is long enough to let one man's unfinished voice slowly swallow itself back down into the ink.