The Name Inside the Umbrella Rib

Qingshi Town sat by the river, where the rain came often. Zhou Yongfa had kept his umbrella shop at the town's edge for thirty years. The storefront was small; beneath the eaves he always hung a few half-finished oil-paper umbrellas, and when the rain struck their indigo faces they looked like scraps of night that had not yet unfolded.

That afternoon the rain came down again. He was gathering the drying umbrella ribs indoors when a woman stepped in under an old umbrella. Its paper canopy was torn across the size of a palm, yet the ribs were unbroken, the bamboo gone yellow with age, the binding threads wound in an old-fashioned way. The woman said the umbrella had belonged to her father, who passed the year before; she had found it among his things and wanted it mended, to keep as a memory.

Zhou took it and ran his fingers along the ribs; his brow creased at once. He knew this work. The green bamboo had been taken from the shaded slope behind the hills, pared, heated straight, and drilled with a force that bore one man's temper. It was Master Shen's hand. Shen, the last oil-paper umbrella maker in town, who had taught Zhou his craft. Yet Shen had never sold his umbrellas, only given them away, and the year the old man left, not one umbrella was missing from the shop—only the man himself never returned.

The woman's surname was Su, a schoolteacher in the city. She knew nothing of the umbrella's origin, only that her father had lived in Qingshi Town for a few years when he was young. Zhou said little, only that the umbrella could be mended, but it would take some days.

At night he lit the lamp and took the umbrella apart. The handle was joined in two sections, the seam hidden so well that no one would notice without dismantling it. He unscrewed it carefully and found a small rolled paper inside. He unfolded it: half a sheet torn from a school exercise book, and in pencil a name and a date. Zhou knew that name. A son of the Chen family, who had run the tofu shop at the east end of town, gone to the provincial city for work at the end of the eighties and never heard from again. The town had reported it; nothing was found; it became a cold case.

He rolled the paper back, returned it to the handle, and lay awake, turning it over.

The next day he went to ask the old neighbors. The tofu shop was long gone; only an old woman of the Chen family remained, hard of hearing, and when he spoke of the umbrella her clouded eyes brightened, then she said she remembered nothing. Zhou asked Old Chen, who had once kept order in the town; the old man sucked his pipe and after a long while said that in the months before Shen vanished, a young man had often come to sit in the shop, the two of them talking behind closed doors—and that young man, he thought, had been Chen's son.

Slowly a picture formed in Zhou's mind: Master Shen had made an umbrella for Chen's son, perhaps as a send-off, perhaps to entrust something. Yet both men had disappeared, and the umbrella had passed, somehow, into the hands of Su Man's father. And who, then, had her father been?

He did not ask Su. Some matters, once spoken by the living, grant no peace to the dead. He mended the umbrella with care, put on a new paper face, left every old rib untouched, and even rewove the binding in its original old-fashioned knot.

The day Su came to collect it, the rain had stopped. He took only the cost of materials, handed her the umbrella, and after a thought drew the half-sheet from his drawer and gave it to her.

"This was in the handle, just as it was. Your father never touched it, and neither did I. Read it yourself, and weigh it as you will."

Su looked at the name on the paper; her face went pale, but she neither asked nor wept. She folded the paper and the umbrella into her cloth bundle and thanked him once.

After she left, Zhou sat back at his bench. Mist had risen on the river beyond the window. He had studied Master Shen's craft most of his life, and in the end could not say where his teacher had gone. The umbrella was mended, yet the old account hidden beneath it lay like the rain that fell each year on Qingshi Town—it passed, but the ground stayed wet, and no one could ever dry it completely.

He reached out and brightened the last lamp under the eaves, and from far off came the sound of a night vendor's wooden clapper, once, and then again.