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Mama said that Ulrike wasn’t allowed to call him Sad Andreas. It wasn’t kindly or Christian, she said. She’d suggested “Big Andreas” instead, but that was silly. He wasn’t big like Big Jorg; he was just a grown-up, and his arms were all skinny. Besides, some day her brother Andreas was going to be a grown-up too and then everyone would get confused. Grandma Grett was already saying “Look how big you are!” every time she saw them.
So he was “Old Andreas” instead, even though Dad kept saying he wasn’t that old. Ulrike didn’t believe that. He looked ancient. He was bent and wrinkly like Ill Peter and his hair was all full of gray and sometimes his hands shook.
Mama and Dad and Grandma Else mostly called him “Master Maler.” Andreas–her Andreas–didn’t have to call him anything special.
Ulrike still did call him “Sad Andreas” sometimes, secretly, in her head. She couldn’t help it. It was the first thing you noticed about him.
Some people just worked that way, Dad had told her. Ulrike didn’t understand. There were so many things to laugh about: when Dad would toss her up in the air and catch her, the way that Süẞe would run over and lick wet sloppy kisses onto her face, when Mama pretended she was working and then dove in with a secret tickle attack.
Some people had melancholy hearts, Dad said, and they didn’t mean anything by it if they couldn’t laugh as much as other people or had to go sit by the fire alone sometimes. Grandma Else was like that. She always looked sad when she smiled and sadder when she didn’t. Well. Not always. When Andreas showed her a drawing he had made for her or she found where Ulrike had been hiding in hide-and-seek or she pulled both of them up onto her lap to get them out of Mama’s way, then her smiles were big and bright.
So Ulrike knew there must be a way to make Old Andreas look happy, even though she hadn’t found it yet. He was very polite when he played with her and Andreas and let her talk as much as she wanted, and he listened nicely and put on his sad little smile, but not even her best silly faces could make him laugh.
When Old Andreas had been staying with them for a few weeks, they ran out of ink. Dad had been so busy with Business–that was how he talked about the Town Council, Business, and there was so much more Business now because the church had fallen over all the way into rubble–that he didn’t realize they hardly had any left.
“We can buy some,” said Mama, smiling wisely.
“But I wanna make it!” said Ulrike, pulling on Dad’s jacket in case he wasn’t listening. Making ink was her favorite.
Dad scooped her up in his arms. “All right!” he said. “We’d better start today, then.”
Ulrike waited very patiently while he got out the bag of galls and took down the big heavy mortar and pestle from its shelf. She was too wriggly from excitement for Dad to keep holding her, but she did her happy dancing in the corner with tiny steps and she didn’t shriek even once.
“You should tell your brother,” said Dad.
Ulrike shook her head. “But he doesn’t like the loud part!”
“We still have to measure them first.”
Andreas did like measuring.
“You won’t crunch them without me?”
Dad bent down and kissed the top of her head, right in the middle of her favorite hat. “I wouldn’t dream of it,” he said.
So Ulrike ran quick quick quick out the door and into the front yard. Andreas was lying on the grass, drawing, and Old Andreas was sitting next to him. Old Andreas still looked sad, his face all creased up as he looked at the art.
“We’re making ink!” Ulrike announced grandly.
“Oh!” said Andreas. He smiled. His smiles were small, like Dad’s, not big like Ulrike’s and Mama’s and Grandma Grett’s, but they were still real and happy. Just quiet. Andreas was shy, so he needed Ulrike to look out for him.
“ I’m going to crunch the galls. But you can measure!”
“Okay.”
Ulrike held out a hand. “We’re ready now. Come on!”
While Andreas stood up and carefully brushed the dirt off his knees, Ulrike was thinking. Old Andreas had been an artist, Dad and Mama had said. He didn’t draw with her and Andreas, just watched and told them that they had “good composition” and “a strong grasp of linework,” but maybe he liked making things.
“You can come too!” she said.
“Ah,” said Old Andreas. He blinked. “All right . . .”
He looked a little lost, like he was very sleepy and needed a nap. And he always seemed surprised when someone spoke to him. Dad had said that he had lived up at the old abby since before Ulrike was even born–since before Artemis and Apollo were born, even, and they were practically grown-ups!–with nobody but cats for company. Maybe when he wasn’t paying attention he thought everyone around him was a cat still. That would explain why he got so startled when they talked to him.
Sometimes Ulrike liked to pretend to be a cat. She’d have to stop doing it around Old Andreas, though, in case he got confused.
“You can even crunch some of the galls if you want,” she said, because he still seemed unsure and generosity was a virtue.
He looked at her and smiled a little.
“I’ll leave that very important task to you, I think,” he said, “But thank you.”
Ulrike stood in the corner leaning back and forth onto her toes while Andreas helped Dad measure out the galls. Old Andreas stood behind her. His shoulders were all hunched, so she held his hand so he wouldn’t be scared.
“It gets loud when we crunch the galls,” she told him. “It’s okay to go back outside. But it won’t hurt you.”
Her Andreas didn’t like when things were loud. Mama would wrap him up in blankets when it thundered, and they were careful not to go too close to Endris’ forge while he was working, and if Süẞe got scared and started barking he had to cover up his ears. She didn’t know for certain sure if Old Andreas was like that, but he acted nervous enough that it would make sense.
“All right, said Dad, “It’s your turn, Ulrike!”
Ulrike waited until Andreas had run to their corner and passed Old Andreas’ hand over to him. Then she bounced over to where Dad stood with the mortar and pestle.
“Be careful,” Dad told Ulrike as they poured the galls into their bowl. She nodded. He ought to know that she was always careful!
Dad put his big hands over hers to help her lift the pestle, even though Ulrike was definitely strong enough that she could have done it on her own. It was okay. Dad liked to be helpful.
“Crunch!” she chanted, as the pestle fell and the oak-galls shattered. “Crunch! Crunch! Crunch!” She loved the noise the pestle made and the feel of it in her hand and how the hollow galls fell apart into big pieces with the first hit and then broke down into tiny tiny pieces like sand. It made her feel very powerful.
“That’s enough now,” said Dad after a while. “Good job! Andreas, could you help and get the water?”
“Yes,” said Andreas and Old Andreas together. When Ulrike looked up, she saw that they were both still waiting by the door. They blinked, startled, then looked at each other and smiled shyly. Ulrike giggled.
Dad put the galls that Ulrike had so helpfully crunched into a bowl and the Andreases measured out the water and the vinegar and poured them in together.
“And now,” said Dad putting the bowl up on a shelf where Süẞe couldn’t get to it, “We wait.”
Ulrike scrunched her face up. Waiting was her least favorite part. It took forever!
“Then . . . copperas,” said Andreas.
Dad smiled. “That’s right!”
“And more crunching!” said Ulrike. You had to crunch the special tree sap down all the way until it looked like flour.
“Yes,” said Dad, patting her head. “Plenty of crunching for you to do.”
“Like the mill!”
“Just like the mill.”
Andreas tugged on Old Andreas’ hand. “Did you make a lot of ink?” he asked.
“Ah . . .” Old Andreas hunched his shoulders the way he did whenever he realized people were looking at him. He gave Andreas one of his sad little smiles. “I did, yes.”
“Oh!” Dad twiddled with his hands and blushed very pink. “Andreas, if you have a recipe that you prefer, I’m no expert in such things of course . . .”
Dad thought that he wasn’t really good at art, even though anyone could see that the things he made were beautiful. When he lay on the floor and drew with her and Andreas, the sketch of Süẞe on his paper looked like she was about to start barking. He’d painted the leaves around the door of the mill, all bright and twisty and just as colorful as when the real leaves fell off the trees in the fall. He’d painted stars all around her cradle when she was a baby, pretty little bright spots that she’d loved so much she wanted to reach out and eat them. Upstairs there was a small portrait he’d painted of Mama back in the olden days when they were courting, and she looked just as kind and happy and beautiful as she did in real life.
Ulrike thought he was the best artist ever in the world, even better than Magdalene.
“No, no,” said Old Andreas. “It’s been so long, and I . . . hadn’t the time to make my own once I had the workshop. It was mostly . . .” He stopped talking, staring off past Dad and looking even sadder than he usually did.
That wouldn’t do at all!
“It’s okay,” said Ulrike. “You don’t have to remember. Our ink is very good, except one time Dad put in too much gum and it flaked all the way off the paper when it dried!”
“Aha,” said Dad. “Well–”
“And he was writing things down for the Town Council and the words all fell off! Hahaha!”
Ulrike laughed so hard she had to hold her belly. It was one of her favorite stories, all the important Business words falling down into a crinkly little pile.
She looked up sneakily. Had it worked?
Old Andreas wasn’t laughing like she’d hoped, but she wasn’t sure if he even could laugh. She’d never seen it. But he was smiling, and carefully patting Dad’s shoulder with his spidery old hand. Dad didn’t look happy. It wasn’t his favorite story, no matter how funny it was.
“It happens to all of us,” Old Andreas said. “Once I forgot to add gum at all and the ink sank right through the paper.”
Ulrike cackled. Even Dad cracked a smile, but Andreas gasped, horrified.
“It was a few pages of my sketchbook lost, I thought. I came back later and used them as the basis for some nighttime scenes. You know.” He smiled. “Value drawings, but, uh, mostly in black.”
“I knocked an ink pot over once,” Andreas admitted shyly. “It went all over my drawing.”
“Ah,” said Old Andreas, “Then you truly understand the trials of being an artist.”
He smiled at them, and Ulrike thought that maybe, just for a minute, he looked a little less sad.
Ulrike tried to be patient as they waited for the galls to soak, she really did. But it was days , and she didn’t even get to stir them after the first time because she got too excited and splashed some of the vinegary gall-water onto the floor. Andreas stirred them instead, very slowly and carefully, while Ulrike watched with her cheeks all puffed up with jealousy.
Mama took them into town to visit Grandma Grett so Ulrike got kisses and raisin bread, which made waiting a little easier, and while they were there Artemis came by with the biggest frog Ulrike had ever seen hidden in her skirts. They had to chase it all around the bakery to catch it before it hopped into the dough, and then Ulrike was so excited that she had to keep running and hopping like she was a frog. Mama had to carry her back home, she was so tired.
But finally finally finally she’d waited long enough.
First they had to squeeeeeze all the water out of the galls into a new bowl. Papa poured it out into a cloth and then Ulrike and Andreas took turns squishing it as hard as they could so the water dribbled out. It didn’t look like ink yet, just brown and dirty like the water in a mud puddle.
“It smells like the Shrine,” said Andreas.
“And like vinegar,” said Ulrike, wrinkling her nose.
But Andreas was right, too. The galls did smell like when you walked out into the forest after it had been raining and the leaves were all wet and full of creepy-crawlies that skittered away when you got close. It would be kind of nice without the vinegar.
“Do you want to help with the straining?” Dad asked Old Andreas, who was watching them from the table.
“I’m not done!” Ulrike protested, giving the cloth an extra tight squeeze.
“No,” Old Andreas said. “I’ve not much strength left in my hands.”
Ulrike wanted to assure him that it was okay because she had really strong hands, but she was squeezing so hard that she couldn’t talk.
“There!” she said finally, sitting back and wiping her forehead the way Dad did when he was really tired from working the mill. All the gall bits in the cloth were probably dry as a bone, she had squeezed them so good!
“This next part’s the best,” she told Old Andreas. “Even better than the crunching!”
“Really?”
She frowned. He didn’t look as excited as he should be. “Don’t you remember from when you made ink? Or did you forget because you’re too old?”
“Ulrike–” said Dad.
“Mama says that Ill Peter doesn’t remember things very well any more because he’s the oldest man in town, so if you–”
“Ulrike!” Dad took her by the shoulders. “Why don’t you help me make sure the copperas is ready?”
“Okay!”
They measured it out from the jar and then gathered around the table, Ulrike and Andreas and Dad and Mama and Old Andreas. Grandma Else was out visiting with the ladies. Maybe they would have time to make a drawing for her before she got back, as a present.
Mama put down her mending and picked Andreas up so he could see better, and Ulrike was about to pull on Dad’s shirt so he would pick her up when she changed her mind and tugged on Old Andreas’ sleeve instead. He blinked at her when she held up her arms.
“I wanna see!”
“Ah . . . all right.”
He picked her up like she was very fragile. Ulrike could feel all the bones in his arms even though Mama had been trying to fatten him up ever since he first started staying with them. She put her arms around his neck and was careful not to wiggle.
Dad poured the copperas into the gall water and stirred.
And it was like a miracle.
It always made Ulrike think about Christ turning water into wine. As soon as the copperas touched it, the pale dirty-looking water started to turn black. Black like the night sky, darker than ash or iron, shiny and deep and beautiful.
Ulrike and Andreas gasped in delight. Dad kept stirring, and the darkness spread out from the middle of the bowl and ate all the pale water up until the whole thing was ink.
And Old Andreas gasped too, though it sounded strange. When Ulrike turned around to look at him, his eyes were all shiny and his lip was shaking.
“What’s wrong?”
“I’d . . . forgotten,” Old Andreas whispered. “How marvelous it seemed, when I was young. How marvelous everything seemed.”
Ulrike patted his face.
“Oh!” she said. “I’m glad you remembered.”
And then he did laugh, almost. It was just one sharp bark and she couldn’t tell if it was sad or happy.
“So am I,” he said, and he squeezed her tight with his skinny arms. Ulrike snuggled in close to him and squeezed back. A warm teardrop rolled down his nose and splashed into her hair. She tried to pat his back the way Dad and Mama did to her when she cried, but her arms weren’t long enough so she patted the top of his shoulder instead.
“Andreas–” said Dad, holding his arms out to take Ulrike back, but Old Andreas shook his head.
“It’s all right,” he said. “I–thank you. Thank you.”
“You can help us make ink any time,” said Andreas. Ulrike shook her head yes, even though Old Andreas probably couldn’t see her.
“I will!” He almost-laughed again. “I will. But–ha–we can’t forget to add the gum to this batch, now can we?”
Ulrike leaned back enough that she could see his face. There were still tears in his eyes, but he was smiling–the biggest, brightest smile she’d ever seen him make. It crinkled up the skin around his eyes into happy little wrinkles like Grandma Grett had.
And he didn’t look afraid. Every other time Ulrike had seen him, there had been a look on his face like he’d just been caught stealing sweets, or like he was a rabbit about to be chased away from someone’s garden. Like he was about to run away back to the old Abby and the cats and start living on leaves and rainwater again.
“Do you want to help me crunch it?” Ulrike asked.
And Old Andreas beamed at her.
“I would love to,” he said.
Dad and Andreas did the measuring, and then Ulrike stood up on the chair with Old Andreas spotting her and brought the pestle down–crunch!–onto the chunks of pretty honey-brown gum. They cracked and splintered in little white lines, like spiderwebs or labyrinths.
“They’re from special trees, you know,” she told him. “From way far away.”
“Yes,” said Mama, “The only thing the sap from the trees around here is good for is sticky fingers. And sticky clothes, and sticky hair . . .”
“Speaking from experience, I take it?” said Old Andreas. Ulrike held the pestle out for him, and he took it in his big scar-speckled hand.
“There have been some very experimental ink attempts in this household!” Mama laughed.
And Old Andreas laughed too–still not quite a whole laugh, but a quick little chuckle like a single bubble bursting in a pot. He took the pestle and crunched it down, and then he rolled it around the mortar in a circle, his hands working as smoothly as Grandma Grett’s hands over her doughs. The bits of gum sparkled as he ground them down.
But he didn’t work for too long before he looked back at Ulrike and smiled. The edges of his mouth were twitchy, like they couldn’t quite decide whether the smile was real or not, but there was something twinkly in his eyes.
“Back to you, Mistress Mülleryn,” he said.
Some of the other grown-ups in town liked to play at being silly-polite, so Ulrike knew what to do. She curtsied right there on the chair and said, “Thank you, Master Maler!” as grandly as she could.
Then she got back to the crunching.
Finally all the gum was crunched up as fine as flour, and Dad tipped it up into the ink. They watched it whoosh down like a cloud.
“Time to mix it up!” said Dad. “We can all take turns!”
Dad and Andreas got the first stirring turn because they hadn’t helped with the crunching at all. Ulrike plopped down into her chair and smiled. Making ink was always fun, but she liked having Old Andreas there. He knew a lot about art, and he was nice even if putting the copperas in had made him cry. It had made him almost laugh, too! She was making progress! And she was making ink!
She felt very happy when she took the bowl and spoon for her turn at stirring. And when Ulrike was happy, she was not very good at stirring things gently.
Splash!
Andreas gasped. So did Dad. Mama jumped in to pull the bowl out of Ulrike’s hands.
Ulrike looked down. There were little speckles of ink all across her arms and the table, and she could feel more of them on her face.
Then she looked up.
Old Andreas was frozen there, looking at her from a face that was covered in splotches of ink. They dripped down his nose and his stubbly chin and onto his clothes. Parts of his gray hair were almost as dark as Ulrike’s. Even one of his ears was full of ink!
Urike felt her eyes get very big. She was going to be in so much trouble! And Old Andreas was going to be so upset! She’d made a mess and gotten him all dirty when they were all supposed to be extra nice to him, and–
And then he started laughing.
At first it was more barks, loud enough that Süẞe barked back, almost like hiccups. Like big bubbles popping. And then it was like a pot that had boiled all the way over and couldn’t stop. Old Andreas’ shoulders started to shake and he bent over the table and just laughed and laughed and laughed. He looked so funny that Ulrike had to laugh too. She threw her head back and kicked her feet and couldn’t stop until her belly hurt.
Every time she thought Old Andreas might be done he would look up and see her and his eyes would sparkle and he would start up again. They traded the laughing back and forth like they were kicking a ball, and even Dad and Mama giggled a little while they tried to clean Ulrike up. Andreas reached out shyly to poke his finger into the ink on the table and draw a splotch onto his own nose, and when Old Andreas saw it he cackled so hard he almost fell over.
“All the ladies send their–oh!”
Grandma Else stood in the door, her eyes big and round as she stared at the messy, inky house and her messy, inky family. Then she snorted. Then she giggled.
And then everyone in the whole house was laughing. But out of all of them, Old Andreas laughed the longest and the loudest.
Mama had been right, Ulrike decided.
She wasn’t going to call him Sad Andreas anymore.