The Glassblower (18 page)

Why not, after all?

Why shouldn’t he mix business with pleasure? Had that not been his intention from the start? Which he had only discarded—at least until today—because the matter of B. had arisen in the meantime? Could he not initiate Johanna into the game, at least a little ways? The risks were great, he had to admit; in the worst case, she would be shocked by the suggestion and give notice, and then he would have lost a capable assistant.

All the same, the thought of introducing a woman whose sensual appetites still slumbered into his kind of pleasure was ever more enticing. It was something he had done only once before, but at this moment, he didn’t want to remember the catastrophe that had resulted. As a rule, the women he played with were all more experienced at the game than he was. Perhaps that was another reason he did not know how to shift what was—so far—a business relationship to the next level. He gnawed at his lower lip until he tasted the familiar metallic flavor. Should he take her out on the town? Whisper sweet words in her ear? Shower her with gifts?

Strobel leaned back in his chair. The problem was that he had never been interested in such conventional flirtations. He saw no appeal in charming Johanna with flattery. He had no desire to see her eyes light up as he presented her with a gift. He had no interest in Johanna as a woman with feminine feelings. It was her stubbornness and contrary ways that made her desirable. Her fearlessness, coupled with a natural arrogance that was seldom found in a woman. Of course he knew that part of this arrogance was simply a show. That Johanna wanted to mask her insecurities. But that was quite permissible. More than that, it was precisely what made the whole matter appealing.

His eyes drifted down the hallway toward Johanna’s room.

He stood up abruptly before he could lose himself entirely in such fantasies. On his way back into the shop, he scolded himself for having wasted even a moment on such thoughts.

“Only a fool plays with fire in his own house!”

He had already lost his self-control once, back in his old life—and lost everything else as well. Did he want to risk the same thing happening again? It was not difficult to answer that question—only fools made the same mistake twice.

31

At last the house was empty. Sometimes her sisters could be hard work. Especially Ruth. The way she had been flapping about just now! As though she had some important meeting to attend. Not that it made any difference whether she went out for her stroll with Thomas a few minutes earlier or later. It was still a mystery to Marie what Ruth saw in him—or rather, after the dance and the engagement, it was even
more
of a mystery. It was lucky that the fistfight hadn’t led to anything worse.

But enough of that, Marie told herself. She didn’t want to waste a valuable evening alone thinking about what happened when people drank too much beer. All the same her thoughts drifted back to the May dance. She couldn’t stop thinking about the way the women’s skirts had swung as they danced. Like bluebells in the breeze. Their layers of petticoats formed waves—sometimes around their knees, sometimes all the way up to their hips, depending on how fast the women spun. There was such grace and joy in that image. Marie chewed on the end of her pencil. There had to be some way to capture those swinging, curving shapes in glass. For a while she let her pencil wander over the paper as if it had a will of its own. The result could sometimes be extraordinary but not today. Neither she nor her pencil knew what the final shape should be. A drinking goblet with a curved rim? A dish made of fused layers of glass, with the pattern carved through from one layer to the next? A compact?

Marie briefly considered going over to visit Peter. When he made one of his glass animals, he didn’t always know at the outset what shape the end result would be. But she didn’t even know how to phrase her question. “How do I capture the shape of swinging?” Marie had to laugh. Shaking her head, she put down her pencil and got up.

A moment later, she was in Father’s workshop. Hesitantly, as though worried she might see a ghost by their light, she lit the lamps. Scolding herself for her overactive imagination, she went over to Joost’s bench and lamp.

The glass rods, tools, and gas burner were still in place. The only indication that his workbench had been abandoned was the dust that lay over everything like a silken cloth. Marie sighed and wiped away the worst of it with the sleeve of her dress. Ever since they had started working for Heimer, there had been simply no time to keep the house clean.

Obeying an impulse, she fetched her sketching things and sat down at Joost’s bench. Straightaway she felt better than she had at her improvised place at the kitchen table.

For a while she simply sat there enjoying the silence. She dearly missed working in this room. How different it was from the Heimer workshop, with the din of the three lamps burning, all the people, Eva’s chatter, the loud singing, the hurrying and scurrying. She shook her head. The work was different too. Heimer had more and more orders coming in. The lists that he handed out to his three sons and the hired hands every morning described what the customers wanted down to the last detail. And in the evenings the old man checked whether it had been done properly, again down to the last detail. If not, they would work late. There was no time left for Marie’s own designs.

Perhaps that was why her imagination was letting her down now? It was like an old door that nobody ever opened; the lock would gradually rust over until it was jammed tight shut. It was up to her to make sure that didn’t happen.

She shut her eyes and let her thoughts roam free.

In the Heimer workshop, everything was aimed at making products. And everything he produced—no matter how ornately decorated the drinking glasses or dishes or goblets were—was expressly made to serve a purpose.

Maybe that was it! Maybe she had to free herself from the idea of use and function. Marie’s eyes widened. Suddenly her mouth was watering, so much that she had to swallow hard. What was the opposite of useful? Not useless, surely? No, she mustn’t be discouraged, she had to keep thinking.

She wanted to capture a curve, a swing. A movement that had made her smile, that made her feel joyful. Perhaps there was no way to do this on the base of a dish. Perhaps the only way to capture feelings was to create something with no function in mind. Something that existed for no other reason than to please the eye and lift the heart. The idea of blowing glass as a work of art, for its own sake, with no practical purpose was risky, however.

If she were to ask the glassblowers of Lauscha whether they saw what they did as a craft or an art, the overwhelming majority would say the former. Marie knew of one man in the village who called himself an artist. His name was George Silber—he insisted that people pronounce his name with a soft
g
in the English manner—and he traveled a great deal. On the rare occasions when he was back in Lauscha he held forth about all the international exhibitions where he showed his pieces to a select audience. The rest of Lauscha laughed at him and his shapeless glass figures, which he gave odd names like
Venus Awakening
or
Zeus at Daybreak
. Art? Well, if there were any such thing as art, it meant something quite different to them. A drinking glass painted with a wreath of lily of the valley—that was art. Or a figure of a stag made using the free-blowing technique.

Anything else was just a waste of time.

So what if it was? Marie decided that as long as she liked whatever she drew or dreamt up, nobody could laugh at her for it. Nobody had to agree to call it art.

Thoughtfully, she opened her sketchpad. Now she was ready to let her pencil go wherever it wanted. This time she felt even after the first few strokes that her pencil was guided not by the hand that held it but by some power deep within her. The feeling was not entirely new, but she had never known it to be so strong before. She gave herself up to it entirely, trusting its strength.

She drew and drew. Her hand picked up the pencils, color after color, without conscious thought. Instead of putting each one back into the box, she let them drop where they would. Soon the workbench looked like a battlefield, strewn with colorful spears. Marie shaded and crosshatched, blurred the lines or drew them in more strongly.

All the while she was thinking of the gas flame and the glass rods. Glass was difficult to work with, perhaps more difficult than any other substance. Joost had said this over and over again, even when they were children; if a glassblower didn’t hold the rod over the flame for long enough it was sluggish and recalcitrant. Heat it up too much though and it flowed and dripped like honey. Its transparency was unique—Marie couldn’t think of any other material that could match it in this respect—but that very quality tested a glassblower’s skills anew every day, for every little mistake was clear to see. There was no way to hide even the least little bubble or knot or bump. A wood carver could cut away here and there. Iron could be filed down or wrought anew, but glass had to be perfect. And as Marie saw it, a sketch was worth nothing if it could not be made at the lamp.

By the time she finished, her fingers were trembling and then some. She put her hand to her mouth as though she wanted to hide even from herself that she was so awestruck. But the shape she saw on the page in front of her was easily described. She had drawn a spiral. A spiral in all the colors of the rainbow, growing ever brighter and fresher as her eye followed it upward. At the very top was a dainty little loop from which it could be hung. In a window for instance. Or from the ceiling.

A glassblower would have to know his trade well to blow and shape such a spiral.

A glassblower would also have to know how to make the rods of differently colored raw glass melt cleanly into each other.

But all that was just tricks of the trade. Technique.

Marie was captivated by something else, however, something that could not be put into words; she could imagine the colorful light that this spiral would beam into a room when it caught the sunlight. She could almost feel the movement, turning and turning, that the spiral would make when tapped with a fingertip. Images and emotions showered down upon her like a warm summer rain. Marie leaned back on her chair and savored it all.

She saw a housewife, tired from the day’s never-ending chores and work. A couple of children clung to her skirts as she elbowed the door open, a basket of laundry in her hands. And then she would catch sight of Marie’s spiral hanging in the window of the room. Even this first glance would lighten her mood a little. Perhaps it would be enough for her just to look at the spiral. Perhaps she would run her finger over its smooth, cold curves. A smile would flit across her lips. And when she left the room, there would be a new lightness in her step. Perhaps the smile would even stay with her for a while.

Marie opened her eyes again.

She shivered.

A warm summer rain might be refreshing, but it still left you wet and cold. They were daydreams, nothing but daydreams!

Wilhelm Heimer would laugh if she were to show him her spiral. One of his sons or Eva might even make an indecent joke out of it—Marie believed them entirely capable of it. There was not a glassblower in Lauscha—not one—who would take a chance on making her design a reality. The best thing would be to shut it away in a drawer. Marie laboriously collected all her pencils and packed them away.

She put out the light in the workshop, then stood in the doorway for a moment and looked longingly over at Joost’s gas burner. That flame had the power to breathe life into her pictures. But she, Marie Steinmann, had no such power.

If only she knew how to blow glass!

32

Once all the roads outside of town were open for travelers again, the buyers came to Sonneberg in droves. Over the next few weeks, the bell over the shop door tinkled so often that Johanna wondered how it could ever have startled her back when she was new in the job. There was still a mountain of paperwork to get through for the Woolworth order, but she kept having to put it aside to help Strobel. Though she delighted in being part of the hurly-burly of business life, she had to admit that she had rarely worked so hard in her life. In addition to the workload itself, Strobel was visibly on edge. As the date of his departure drew nearer, he grew increasingly irritable. Johanna would never have thought such a self-possessed and worldly man could lose his composure so easily.

When he finally marched off to the railway station one Monday morning, Johanna heaved a secret sigh of relief. If he had tried to tell her one more time what to do while he was away, then
she
would probably have left town. He warned her at least half a dozen times to keep a close eye on the cash till. And the catalog. He was practically sick with worry that his competitors might find some way to spy on his samples book while he was away. In the end he had put Johanna herself so much on edge that she took the cash and the catalog with her into her room every night and hid them under her bed.

Over the next few days, however, Johanna realized just how different it was to have to shoulder all the decisions herself, great or small, rather than just carrying out orders. Should she let Monsieur Blatt from Lyon have that discount he wanted, even though it was more than Strobel had told her to allow? Which glassblower should have the order for five hundred silvered goblets now that Bavarian Hans had sprained his wrist and couldn’t take it on? Was it her place to tell off Sybille Stein for neglecting the housekeeping ever since Strobel had left?

All in all, though, the first week passed without any major disasters, and Johanna was pleased with how she had handled her new role. All the same, by Friday she was exhausted, so she spontaneously decided to stay the weekend in Sonneberg for the first time. She scribbled down a quick note for her sisters and gave it to one of the messenger women who came by the shop every day at noon.

When she went to bed that evening at eight o’clock instead of setting off for the long trip home, it was an unfamiliar but pleasant feeling. That she didn’t have to get up at any particular hour the next morning was a great relief.

By the time Johanna finally awoke the following day, it was noon. She staggered to her washstand and looked at herself in the mirror incredulously, shocked that she had slept so late. Sybille Stein did not come in on weekends, so there was no hot water either. She splashed her face with cold water until she was well and truly awake. Then she put up her hair, chose a cream lace collar for her blue dress, and got dressed. It was a strange and seductive feeling to have a whole day ahead of her and no need to hurry or fret.

She was just on her way to the kitchen when a knock at the door made her jump. She thought of the money and the catalog under her bed—thieves!—but came to her senses a moment later. Thieves would hardly come knocking. Annoyed at her own fearfulness, she went to the door and pulled it open.

“Ruth!” She felt a chill in her bones. “What’s wrong? Is it Marie? Did something—”

“Everything’s fine,” Ruth hurried to reassure her. “We got your message. And I thought, if you’re not coming to us, then I’ll just come to you.”

Johanna’s heart slowly stopped hammering.

“You certainly wouldn’t come to visit me out of sheer affection,” she said suspiciously. “There’s another reason, isn’t there?”

Ruth raised her eyebrows. “And what if there is? Do I have to tell you out here in the street?”

“You’re going to have a baby?”

Johanna couldn’t believe what she had just heard. She didn’t
want
to believe it.

“But how could that happen? You’re not even married yet!”

Ruth laughed bitterly. “Do you think that not being married can protect a woman from pregnancy?” It was just like her high-minded sister to make such a remark.

Johanna shook her head brusquely.

“Rubbish. Bu
t . . .
” She didn’t even know herself what she had meant by that. “What does Thomas say about it?”

Ruth sat up straight. “He’s pleased as Punch,” she said. Seeing the skepticism in Johanna’s face, she added, “No, he really is! If I hadn’t sworn him to silence, he’d be going round telling the world right now that he’s going to be a father.”

Ruth decided to keep to herself just how Thomas had taken the news of impending fatherhood.
“Jackpot, first shot!”
he had said, strutting like a cockerel. Instead she said, “Sebastian and Eva have been trying to have children for years now without any luck, so you can see why he’s so pleased. There’s going to be a little Heimer at last! And Thomas has even been to see the pastor. He decided that we should get married at the end of June. Which suits me. The sooner the better. He can hardly wait to tell his father the good news.”

“Old Heimer will have some idea what’s coming when you suddenly rush to get married so soon after the engagement. The old fellow can put two and two together.”

“I don’t know about that.” Ruth shrugged. She didn’t care what the old man thought. “Anyway, I don’t want to stand in church with my bump showing. Nobody needs to know that we’ve alread
y . . .
”

Johanna got up and went to the calendar that hung next to the kitchen dresser. She leafed through it quickly and then said with relief, “What luck—Strobel will be back by then. Otherwise I would have missed your wedding.”

“You’d have me to answer to if you did,” Ruth said, then she clapped her hands. “So now we’re going shopping. I’m going to buy myself a dress, and Thomas says he doesn’t care how much it costs.”

Johanna looked at her askance. “Well, he really does seem pleased.”

If Johanna had ever thought that she was a fussy shopper, she soon learned better; it took several hours for her sister to select a dress in wine-red taffeta, and during that time not a single item in the shop escaped her scrutiny. Red was the usual color for a bride to wear in Germany, but she only came back to the dress after looking at almost everything else as well.

It wasn’t difficult to persuade Ruth to go out to one of the town’s many restaurants after that. Tired but happy, they sat at a table by the window and enjoyed the warm sunshine that filtered through the lace curtains. Ordering coffee and the day’s special—a kohlrabi bake with sausage and potato—they felt like women of the world. Three other tables were occupied by women, two of whom were messengers Johanna regularly sent to the villages. They waved at her from their table. While Johanna was relieved to realize it was not unusual for women to eat out at a restaurant, Ruth simply assumed that her sister did this every day.

When their food came, they ate hungrily. Because it was a special day, they also ordered a slice of the chocolate cake, which had tempted them from its stand. But once the cake was in front of them, neither of them touched it for a while. It was Ruth who spoke aloud what they both were thinking.

“Isn’t it odd? Just six months ago, we didn’t know where our next meal was coming from. Simple village girls, we were. And now we’re sitting in a restaurant in Sonneberg planning my wedding.”

“Things certainly do change—sometimes even for the better,” Johanna said, digging her fork into the cake happily. “So? What’s it like, sleeping with a man?” she asked.

Ruth looked at her incredulously. Had Johanna really asked such a question?

“If you’d rather not talk about i
t . . .
”

Did she want to talk about it? Ruth was torn. She wanted very much to tell
someone
what it had been like. But was Johanna the right person to talk to?

Her hesitation made Johanna waver too. “I only ask because of the pregnanc
y . . .
Couldn’t you have put Thomas off a little?”

“Putting a man off isn’t so easy. When you’re in love, the moment will eventually come when it really gets difficult. But you wouldn’t understand such things,” Ruth replied rather condescendingly.

“No, you’re right, I really can’t imagine that sort of thing,” Johanna agreed. She threw up her hands in an almost comical gesture. “Mind you, I can fill out order forms and keep the books.”

Ruth laughed at Johanna’s disarming honesty.

“Well that’s certainly going to come in handy in affairs of the heart!”

They ate their cake in silence. While Johanna gazed fixedly down at her plate, Ruth’s thoughts wandered back to her first night with Thomas.

After the May dance had ended in such disarray, they had made their way up to the forest the following evening instead. Thomas hadn’t gotten anything ready but a blanket and a couple of candles. Though it was far from the magical, romantic setting Ruth had hoped for, she had let him pull her down onto the blanket. Thomas had kept his part of the bargain by announcing their engagement at the village dance, so she couldn’t back out now. His compliments that evening had been oddly halfhearted. He told her that he thought of her night and day and that she was beautiful, but he stumbled through the words as though they were a poem he had been forced to learn by rote. Straight after that, his hands were hunting around under her skirt. Greedily. Possessively.

Ruth’s mouth was dry. She swallowed a bite of cake.

After that it all had happened very fast. He had shoved her legs apart with his calloused hands and pressed her body down onto the blanket. The mossy forest floor beneath was lumpy; there was something digging painfully into her back—a root or a stone or a pinecone; and she felt cold, though she hadn’t dared complain. The last thing she had wanted to hear just then was some remark about how overly sensitive she was.

And then?

She had squeezed her eyes shut and tried to conjure up some of the romance she had so desperately wanted for the occasion. Groaning and breathing heavily into her ear, he thrust into the chill of her body—and it hurt. Ruth had been relieved when he finally let go.

Involuntarily she pressed her legs together. The sudden movement made Johanna look up. Ruth smiled at her and took a sip of coffee.

She had been so shocked by the nasty dampness between her legs!

When Thomas had seen her dismay, he had simply laughed. “That’s the elixir of life! You’ll have to get used to that.” Then he had taken her in his arms and they had looked up at the night sky to search for stars together. But it was overcast that night. All the same, these were, for Ruth, the most beautiful minutes of the evening.

She sighed and looked across at Johanna.

“Mrs. Heimer—it’ll take me a while to get used to that.”

“How do you think I’ll manage?” Johanna asked.

They both had to laugh.

“Is he really Prince Charming, like you used to dream about when you were a girl?” Johanna asked quietly.

Ruth was quiet. It was an important question. Not for Johanna, she realized, but for her.

She certainly couldn’t claim that he catered to her every whim. But it wasn’t stinginess that made Thomas treat her s
o . . .
unimaginatively. That was just the way he was. If she enthused to him about something she had seen in one of the magazines that Johanna brought home, he merely looked at her with blank incomprehension. “You and your silly ideas,” he would say. But was that any surprise? Thomas had grown up in a household that sneered at sophistication.

At last she answered, “No, he’s not Prince Charming. But what would I do with someone like that in Lauscha?” She smiled coquettishly. “I’d rather have the son of the richest glassblower in the village. After all I’m no princess myself; I’m just a perfectly ordinary girl.”

“No you’re not,” Johanna replied decisively. “Thomas couldn’t find a woman anywhere in Lauscha or beyond who’s prettier than you or cleverer or works harder! Don’t you hide your light under a bushel, not even for a moment!”

Ruth was deeply affected but popped the last piece of cake into her mouth to hide it. “Sometimes I have my doubts,” she admitted. “Marie has her painting; you’ve got your work here in town and earn a good wage. But m
e . . . 
?”

“You’ll soon be the mother of a curly-haired little blond angel, and we’ll all be wildly envious of you,” Johanna said, grinning. “But before that you’ll be the prettiest bride Lauscha has ever seen.”

“The dress is wonderful, isn’t it?” When Ruth thought of the big packet under the table, her melancholy vanished. “Eva will be so jealous she’ll burst!”

The two sisters hugged good-bye in the doorway of Strobel’s shop. Ruth was already outside when she turned around one more time.

“Where has Strobel gone anyway?” Though she wasn’t really interested, she felt a twinge of guilt after talking about herself and Thomas all afternoon.

“I have no idea,” Johanna answered darkly. “But given the fuss he made about it you’d have thought he were setting off for a trip around the world.”

“That’s odd,” Ruth declared. “Don’t you talk to one another, then?”