Painful Mistakes
Today’s job was to bring the pot and ashes to the forest and boil some of the white bark for about a bell’s time while the black bark from the other wood dried in the sun. Lutz’s step was brisker than usual, probably because the pot alone wasn’t that heavy for him, even with the ashes we were using today thrown in.
After reaching the riverbed, I hung the black bark on my basket so that the sun would dry it. Meanwhile, Lutz prepared the pot. After placing the water-filled pot on the makeshift stone hearth, he went to go get firewood. “Listen, Myne. Don’t leave the pot alone, no matter what.”
“I know that already!” The pot and ashes were both very valuable, both monetarily and in the sense we couldn’t replace them on our own. We didn’t want the white bark to get stolen either, so we absolutely needed someone to keep watch over our stuff, even if that someone was dead weight like me. Lutz, knowing that I had recently been putting more effort into gathering and therefore wandering all over the place, made sure to drive the point home hard. It sucked.
“You say you know that, but I know you’ll just wander off the second you see something interesting.”
“I won’t leave the pot alone until you come back, so hurry and do what you need to do.”
When I first came to the forest, I tried setting my basket down and exploring without it since it was so heavy, but Lutz and Tuuli got super mad at me. Unlike Japan, it wasn’t safe to set something down and go somewhere you couldn’t see it. Thievery was a constant risk. Which was exactly why the kids would carry their baskets on their own backs and only gather what they could carry home themselves.
Lutz ignited the wood he had quickly gathered, and then went off to get more. I placed the black bark on the basket under the sun and watched the pot, while occasionally adjusting the basket as the shadows moved.
“Is it boiling?”
“Uh huh, I think it’s about ready.” I put the ashes and the white bark into the bubbling water, then realized I needed a stick to stir it. But I didn’t have anything like that. ...Nooo, something else I forgot about. Depressed at my feeble imagination’s inability to predict these problems, I looked around to see if there was anything I could use.
“Lutz, we need two sticks of about the same length to stir the pot. The bark of normal wood will peel off into the water, so bamboo is preferable. There should be bamboo close by, right?”
“Two bamboo sticks, huh? Alright.” Lutz found some bamboo and cut them on the spot to make two equally long sticks, which I used like cooking chopsticks to stir the pot. He must have gotten a lot better at dealing with bamboo while struggling to make those strips, I thought to myself. After a bit of stirring, I heard Lutz mumble something.
“...Myne, you’re stirring with those sticks pretty well.”
“Bwuh?! Ah, uummm, yeah. Pretty good, right?” I gave a fake smile, but a cold sweat was gushing down my back. There was no Eastern food here, and thus nobody used chopsticks. As far as I knew, nobody even owned a pair. There wasn’t a little girl in the world who would casually ask for sticks to stir a pot, and then hold them like chopsticks rather than grip them individually by the ends.
...Oh nooo, Lutz is looking at me weird. It’s just my imagination. I’m imagining things. There’s no way he’s suspicious. No way. I kept stirring the pot while avoiding reality. It’d be more suspicious if I changed how I was holding them just because he said something. My only choice was to charge ahead, but my heart wouldn’t stop pounding.
...Aaah, I’m an idiot, a big dumb idiot! I’m basically asking him to get suspicious! I forced as normal of a smile as possible onto my face and kept stirring the boiling white bark, until eventually I heard the faint ringing of bells. It was time.
I dunked the boiled bark into the river and washed off the ash while letting the sun hit it. That should make the bark whiter. I had no idea if the plants of this world functioned the same way, but I had no choice but to work with what I knew.
“And now we leave this bark here for a full day.”
“Mmm. Alright.”
We needed to leave the white bark in the river for a full day as well in order for the paper to be as white and pretty as possible. After Lutz washed the pot, we took turns going gathering. I was picking up noticeably fewer poisonous plants than before. Hopefully I could keep up the good pace.
Today our main paper-related duty was taking the white bark home from the forest. We would gather like normal in the forest, then when it was about time to go home, we would take the white bark out of the river. We were bringing buckets from home with us to hold the white bark instead of the pot, but that was all we needed to do.
“We’re going to be working in the storage building from now on.”
“Alright. Guess we gotta gather as much as we can today, huh?”
I gathered a lot of edible plants (vetted by Lutz), meryls (picked by Lutz), and finally, lots of krans to cook into jam. I tasted the krans several times while gathering them. They were a lot more sour than Japanese fruits, but my diet was so lacking in anything sweet that they tasted delicious.
When the sun rose on the next day, we didn’t go to the forest and instead began work in front of the well by the storage building. I had to do the crud-picking and the water-swishing all in one go to “finish” the paper today, since once you got this far you had to go all the way.
Crud-picking was removing knots and broken bits from the white bark’s fibers. It could be done while sitting, so I volunteered to do it myself. While I was fiddling away at the fibers, Lutz was peeling the edile fruit, crushing them, and putting water on them to make the tororo.
“Hey, Myne. Is this whatever tororo is supposed to be?”
“...Mmm, probably. It feels sticky so it should be fine, even though I’m not really sure. I’ll think about it when I see how sticky the fibers are when I’m mixing them.”
After finishing the crud-picking, it was time to beat the fibers. Lutz took a hard rectangular club made from what looked like evergreen oak and beat the white bark’s fibers until they were fluffy like cotton. He just kept swinging, with his hand clutching the handle at the bottom carved by the people from the lumberyard, wrapped in a cloth he brought from home to avoid hurting his hand.
That was Lutz’s job. I would just get in the way if I tried helping with my noodle arms. He finished fast since we didn’t have many fibers to work with, but things would get a lot more serious when mass production became involved.
Subsequently, we put the loosened fibers into the washtub along with the tororo and started adding water bit by bit, regulating the stickiness. Normally you’d use a rake or something like a comb to stir, but there wasn’t much bark here, so I had Lutz make me two more pair of sticks which I stuck into the pot to stir. Mmm... I’m pretty sure this is what it was like with the milk cartons after I put the starch in.
As I wasn’t a craftsman I couldn’t really balance things well on feel alone, but I scraped up as much of my memories as possible and successfully made the fiber water. With that done, it was finally time to make the paper in the suketa. All that time spent making the two-part frame and the screen was building up to this moment.
“Whew. Finally, something I understand.”
My memories of making recycled paper from milk cartons in school went as follows: Boil the carton, peel off the shiny part, mix it up, add laundry starch, swish in the suketa, and dry. This was the first time that my experience making paper would be useful for making washi. ...Finally! After so long, it’s my time to shine! Thank goodness for experience points!
“You really know what you’re doing?” Lutz, watching me ready the suketa, tilted his head a bit and looked at me with extreme suspicion.
I mean... Sure, I was pretty vague about a lot of things, and once we got going I realized I forgot a lot of things, but all that had to do with my lack of experience. A little peeved at Lutz not trusting me, I puffed out my little girl cheeks and held up my chin. “Yeah! You can trust me! I’ve done this before.”
“...When, and where?” said Lutz sharply, his brows furrowed. His voice made my heart freeze over for a second.
“Ngh?! U-Ummm, th-that’s a girl’s secret! Don’t even think about prying!” GAAAAAH! I’m so so so dumb! Why would I say that?! Lutz is giving me a super flat stare right now. He’s totally looking at me. AAAAH! Did I just throw myself off a cliff here?!
I covered up my internal screaming with a fake smile and put the murky fiber water into the suketa. My fingers were trembling a little, but I pretended not to notice. Once the water was inside, I started moving the suketa side to side, up and down.
“Why do you move it like that?”
“Well, moving it like this spreads the pulpy water out, so the paper will end up equally thick throughout. Also, depending on the type of paper and how thick you want it, you can just repeat this for longer.”
“Huh, interesting. You know that cause you’ve done this before?” Lutz’s eyes dug into me and I knew that not the slightest change of expression would escape him. I didn’t know what I could say to avoid the question. All I could do was fall silent or forcefully change the subject.
“U-Um, Lutz, I’m thinking about experimenting with this and seeing how the number of movements impacts the thickness of the paper. What do you think?”
Lutz must have not liked me dodging the question. I could feel his gaze hardening as he looked between me and the suketa, which I was still moving around. Aaaaah... I feel like I just climbed the cliff to fall off it again...
Once the swishing was done, I took the screen out of the frame and moved the filtered paper to the drying bed. “Be sure not to let air get in between the pieces of paper while you’re stacking them on top of each other. Start at the edge and work your way down.”
“I’ll give it a shot.” Lutz took our other screen and put it into the frame, then began swishing water to make paper. We were just making a postcard’s worth of paper, so a couple of bumps was all it took to get it all spread out equally.
Lutz and I took turns swishing the water around, almost silently. I had expected the white bark to be enough for three pieces of paper, but I was way off the mark. We ended up with ten sheets in the end.
“We don’t have a ton of paper right now, but anyway, we leave the day’s paper stacked on the drying bed. The water will naturally drain out after a full day.”
“Then what?”
“We gently press weights on the paper to squeeze more water out. We can just leave the weights on them for another full day. That’ll get rid of all the tororo’s stickiness.”
“Wow. You sure know a lot about this. Oh, right. Didn’t you say you’ve done this before or something?”
...Oof, that look hurts. He’s definitely figured me out. I didn’t just go off the cliff, I leaped off it. I’m so stupid.
However, despite glaring at me and clearly having something on his mind, Lutz didn’t say anything final. I didn’t want to climb up the cliff yet again for another humiliating self-destruction, so I just got to work making paper without saying anything unnecessary. I had already failed at avoiding the subject, and telling the truth was just too risky. I could guess that he would say something once we finished making paper, but I didn’t know how much he had guessed, nor what he would say to me.
I had already thought up a solution for this, so really, this wasn’t a problem. I didn’t like pain and I didn’t want to be afraid. If things got painful or scary, I just had to unleash the heat inside of me and let it swallow me up. Lately it felt like the heat was getting stronger, so it probably wouldn’t take that long for it to consume me entirely.
The problem was, unlike last time, I now had a strong attachment to this world. All we had left to do with the paper was let it dry. There was basically nothing that could go wrong, and with paper taken care of, I wanted to at least make books before disappearing.
...I wonder if I can buy time until then. I want to buy that time. I have to postpone my death until I can make a book. With those thoughts in mind and clouds over my heart, I continued working.
The next day, we walked to the forest in almost total silence. I put the black bark into the river and then we went off gathering. We stopped by the storage building to put the weights on, but that was all we had to do. I couldn’t help but find myself thinking about what Lutz was feeling. I could tell he was thinking the same about me, judging by his frequent glancing my way.
“Hey...”
“Hm? What’s up?” Lutz speaking up made me reflexively shiver. I had thought I was keeping a cool head about things, but my body just wouldn’t back my thoughts up.
Trembling, I waited for Lutz to continue, but he just scratched his blonde hair roughly with his mouth opening and shutting. “...Nevermind.”
“O-Oh?” I knew that I was reaping what I had sown, but still, letting this drag on was really hurting me.
The day after that, I remembered to bring a cutting board and we peeled off the outer black bark. Unlike the trombe bark, it was really hard to get off. The fibers ended up all crumbly. That wasn’t just me being clumsy, either — Lutz was having the same problem. The trombe’s fibers were perfect, but I was questioning whether this other stuff would be usable at all.
“...I guess different woods are easier to work with.”
“Yeah, pretty much.” The crumbled fibers resembled my relationship with Lutz so much I couldn’t help but sigh. “Once this white bark dries, we’ll be good for a while.”
“Alright. Hey... Eh, scratch that. I’ll say it after the paper’s done,” said Lutz before falling silent. I gave a small nod and steeled my resolve.
Lutz had realized I wasn’t Myne and was on the verge of accusing me of being a fake. There was no doubt about it. After all, he hadn’t called me “Myne” once since the day I self-destructed. Just what would he say once the paper was ready? How would he interrogate me? Would he yell at me? My imagination was unfortunately too vivid when it came to this kind of thing, so the Lutz in my imagination was saying all sorts of cruel, heartless things. My own mind drove spears through my heart, making me hang my head.
...That’s just going too far, Lutz! You’re being cruel! Imagination or not, I’m going to cry! I really am!
We worked in the storage building the following day. First, Lutz and I took the white bark we made yesterday, hung it from our baskets, and put them outside. Then, we delicately took the pressed paper off the drying bed sheet by sheet and stuck them to a board.
“Normally we’d use a paint brush to gently get the air bubbles out, but I forgot to order one. Whoops, whoops. The paper’s small enough that we should be fine, anyway.”
“...You forget way too many things.” Lutz glared at me, but since I had recently been imagining a non-stop barrage of pure vitriol coming out of his mouth, that wasn’t enough to phase me. I shrugged and blew it off.
“You just need to get one ready before we make our second batch. More importantly, once these sheets dry under the sun, we’re done. Sunlight should make the paper even whiter.”
Lutz took the board outside and placed it against a wall where the sun was shining. He then washed the drying bed by the well and placed it next to the board so it could dry.
The white paper drying beneath a clear blue sky could only be described as beautiful, and imagining that this was the first step toward a future of books made me sigh in satisfaction. “Aaaah, paper. It’s actual, real paper. We really made it...”
“Hey...”
“But we’re not done yet. The paper needs to dry until evening. Once they’re dry, we’ll peel them off slowly so they don’t rip, and then we’ll be done,” I said, trying to postpone the paper being done so I could stall my conversation with Lutz as much as possible. He must have figured that out, though, given the frustrated look on his face.
“So it’s basically done already, right?”
“...Well, that’s not untrue, but...”
“I told you I had something to say once the paper was done, remember?”
It was time for the interrogation. Lutz’s green eyes shone with ferocious light, his anger coming to the forefront. I bit my lip and faced him, planting my feet solidly onto the ground so I would stay upright no matter what he said to me.
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