The Glassblower (2 page)

2

Whenever Johanna recalled that morning, she always thought of the story of Sleeping Beauty. Marie sat where she was, utterly still, her mouth half open. Ruth was caught between table and bench, half standing, half sitting. And Johanna herself couldn’t step away from the doorway where she stood. It was as though all three of them had turned to stone, as though they could keep the horrible truth at bay if they didn’t move.

Marie was the first to break the spell. She ran up the stairs to Joost’s bedside. Her scream tore through the quiet house and silenced the few birds that still sang outside. Johanna and Ruth stared at one another over the frying pan on the table. Then they rushed upstairs.

The wooden treads of the staircase were pale and polished from years of use, but that morning they blurred into thin yellow stripes before Johanna’s eyes. She tasted something salty at the corner of her mouth, and only realized then that tears were streaming down her cheeks. She could do nothing to stop them—or the thoughts that crowded unbidden into her mind.

Father was dead.

Should they call the doctor from Sonneberg? No, a doctor was no use.

A priest. They needed a priest.

And they would have to wash him. Dead bodies had to be washed. And laid out.

A sob burst from Johanna’s throat, so scorching hot that it hurt.

Marie folded Joost’s hands together on his chest. Thank God his eyes were already closed when Johanna had found him. If one of them had had to shut his eye
s . . .
She couldn’t bear to think about it.

Joost was not even fifty years old. And he’d been in the best of health. Other than the occasional backache, he’d been fit as a fiddle.

“He looks so peaceful,” Marie whispered, smoothing out the bedclothes over him. His body looked much smaller beneath the covers than it had in life.

On tiptoe, as though not to wake him, Ruth crept across to the other side of the bed, leaned over her father, and looked at his face. There was no sign that he had felt any pain.

“Maybe he’s just asleep? More deeply than usual?” Though touching Father didn’t feel right, she tentatively placed a hand on his forehead. She was surprised to find that his skin was not ice-cold the way the stories said. Nor was it damp, or even dry. But the bones beneath the skin were unyielding as Ruth passed her fingers over his face.

Rigor mortis had already set in. Ruth began to cry. Marie was already in tears, and Johanna sobbed loudly.

“But why? I don’t understand!” The lump in her throat swelled, and it was hard to breathe. “How can Father just die in his sleep like this?” Johanna called out plaintively.

But nothing could alter the truth of it. His heart had simply stopped beating as he slept. Johanna went next door to fetch Peter Maienbaum, who was just as shocked as Joost’s daughters when he heard the news. He told them that Joost had seemed to be in fine spirits the night before and showed no sign of being the least bit sick. He’d been laughing along with everybody else at Stinnes, the local joker.

“You know what Stinnes can be like. He’s a loudmouth, but he can keep the whole tavern roaring with laughter,” Peter said distractedly.

Johanna waved this away. She had no time for jokers now.

“We’ll have to lay Father out,” Johanna said. Her voice was flat and calm, as though she were talking about setting the table.

Startled, Ruth and Marie looked at her.

“The best thing to do is clear our workbenches to one side of the room and then carry Father and his bed downstairs.”

“But why would you want to do that? We ca
n . . .
lay him ou
t . . .
just as well up here,” Ruth said, shuddering. Marie looked from one sister to the other.

Johanna shook her head. “No, we’ll have to do it properly. It’s what Father would have wanted. Once people start to com
e . . .
” The rest of her sentence was drowned out by a sob. She turned away.

Ruth and Marie looked on helplessly as their sister’s shoulders shook. Crushed by their own sorrow, neither one of them had a drop of comfort to offer her. Johanna was usually so ready to take charge, but here she was, just as helpless as they were. It made the situation even worse.

Peter cleared his throat. “I’ll go and fetch some of the men. Then we can begin with th
e . . .
”

Why is it that nobody knows what to say?
Johanna thought in a flash of anger as she wiped at her eyes with both hands and her sobs slowly subsided.

Peter shook her gently by the arm. “It might be a good idea for one of you to go downstairs and put the kettle on. For when people come.”

A little while later he returned with three men, who clutched their hats in their hands and uttered the customary words of condolence. Peter took charge and led the men upstairs. First they laid the dead body on the floor; then they took the bed apart and carried each piece down the narrow stairs, cursing under their breath. Then they reassembled the bed in the middle of the workshop, and carried the dead man down the stairs. Once he’d been laid out on the bed, the four men sighed with relief.

When the neighborhood women heard the news, they stopped whatever work they had in hand and came to pay their respects. One brought a dish of mashed potatoes, another a pot of soup, and a third a platter of bread that she had sliced and spread with drippings and sprinkled with salt. The wooden floorboards creaked under the steady tramp of feet while the women bustled about, looking for matches to light the candles, fetching coffee for the men, casting a wary glance at the dead man every now and then.

Widow Grün from two houses down helped Ruth wash the corpse and clothe it, while Johanna and Marie put fresh linens on the bed.

One of the neighbors had evidently already told the priest, for they had just finished laying out the corpse when the pastor showed up at the door, followed by two altar boys swinging censers.

Johanna felt numb as she joined the others in a circle around Joost’s bed while the pastor uttered a few prayers.
This can’t be happening,
she thought.

All day long people stopped in to offer their condolences or share the sisters’ vigil for a while. None of them stayed long, for they all had work waiting for them at home. Every face showed relief that they had been spared such a tragedy. Johanna could not blame them for feeling that way. The winter before, there had been a bad outbreak of the flu in Lauscha, and Hannes the bladesmith, who had been almost ten years younger than Father, had died, along with two of the older villagers down the hill. Johanna had had the same thought at the time:
Thank God it wasn’t any of us!
Every time she came back from Sonneberg and spotted the desolate house with the brass sabre hanging over the door, she always thought of poor Hannes. He had not even had time to marry, poor fellow, he died so young.

Over the course of the afternoon, Johanna began to squirm. Each hand on her shoulder, each murmured word, each clammy handshake—taken all together, they stung like a bunch of nettles. She was convinced that there was more than just sympathy in the sorrowful looks people cast at her. They were expecting something too. They were excited.

Three young women without a man to look after them.

Were people waiting for one of them to collapse in a flood of tears? Or for some other disaster to strike the household? Johanna scolded herself for such uncharitable thoughts. These people were only trying to help as best they could.

3

It was past seven o’clock when the last guests left. Peter Maienbaum was the only one who offered to share the wake. Johanna hesitated for a moment but declined his offer. It was something that they had to do themselves.

None of the sisters could even think of eating, so Ruth spread cloths over all the dishes that the neighbors had brought and put them away for later. They sat down at the kitchen table, tired to the bone.

Johanna got up again and opened the door. “It’s so stuffy in here, you could cut the air with a knife.”

“It’s the incense.” Marie’s eyes were red with tears.

“Not just that. All those peopl
e . . .
” Johanna was too tired to explain that she felt that the visitors had somehow tainted their house. They had left their own smell behind, and the tread of the many boots seemed to linger on the wooden floor, even if there were no prints to be seen.

“Perhaps it’
s . . .
Father?” Ruth glanced back toward the workshop.

“Ruth!” Marie said, shuddering, and looked at Johanna with fear in her eyes.

“Everyone knows that dead bodies begin to smell when—”

“That’s enough!” Johanna cut in harshly. They had the whole night’s wake ahead of them. The last thing they needed was Ruth talking nonsense. She went to the cupboard and took out the rest of the candles. Light was good. Light would certainly help. “That’s not a
dead body
over there, that’s Father.”

Ruth opened her mouth but then thought better about uttering whatever she had been about to say. Nobody wanted an argument with a dead man in the house.

Johanna gradually unclenched her jaw. Her eyes had been staring ahead like a painted puppet’s, but now she looked around, and her arms relaxed as well. She hadn’t realized until then that she had had them crossed in front of her almost the entire day. She leaned back in her chair. For the first time that day, there was nothing she was expected to say, no task she had to do.

One of them was gone now.

The longer the silence lasted, the more they all missed him. The way he’d clattered his spoon on the table when he had to wait too long for his supper, or if he thought Ruth had skimped on putting sausage in the soup. The methodical way he sliced bread and carved the smoked ham.

Johanna was the first to break the silence. “Father was always such a picture of healt
h . . .
” Then she pressed her lips tightly closed again.

Ruth nodded. “He was never a spindle-shanks like Bavarian Hans or Friedmar Grau. But he wasn’t a fat fellow either, not like Wilhelm Heimer.”

“You never needed to look and see whether Father had come into the room. You always felt that he was there.” Marie was speaking Johanna’s thoughts for her. “Everyone respected him.” She smiled. “Do you remember the time he bought those two roosters?”

Johanna laughed a sad little laugh. “He bought them for me from Paul Marzen. He hoped that I would wake up more easily if there were two roosters crowing in the yard, not just one. And then Marzen came knocking at the door, drunk as a skunk, saying that he’d given Father the wrong birds, that these were his best breeding fowl, and he wanted them back.”

“All Father had to do was square his shoulders and Marzen turned tail and fled.”

“And those roosters never did turn out to be of much use.”

They laughed, and then fell quiet again.

“Who will look after us now?” Marie asked.

Johanna looked over at her. She mustn’t ask that. Not tonight. Nor tomorrow, either.

“When you were little, he always used to call you his princess, do you remember?” Marie had always been Joost’s little girl.

“A princess whose palace was inside a soap bubble. He was always promising to tell me the whole story, but he never quite got around to making one up.” Marie’s eyes brimmed with tears again.

“But he always found time to mix up the soapsuds for you to blow bubbles!” said Ruth. “Oh, those bubbles of yours.” She swept her hands through the air in the shape of a ball. “Pfft! They burst all over the place and leave little wet spots behind. Even when I was little, I couldn’t understand what you saw in them.”

“Father understood. He loved to look at the colors, just like I did.” Marie looked up. “I’m sure he’s in heaven now, and there are rainbow colors everywhere. He’ll like that. And he’ll be glad to see Mother again.”

She burst into sobs, and the others followed suit. They didn’t fight the tears.

A long while later, Ruth tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and made a face, sniffling.

“I just remembered when Friedhelm Strobel gave us that order from France with just two weeks’ notice. Five years ago, do you remember? In 1885.”

“Oh my goodness, yes!” Johanna exclaimed, clapping her hands. The candles fluttered in the gust of air. “The order for that French perfumer!” Marie looked baffled and Johanna went on. “Don’t you remember? They wanted five thousand perfume bottles. And every one had to be engraved ‘Eau de Paris.’ ”

Marie snapped her fingers. “I remember now! Father wrote it out for us. But his handwriting was so bad that we couldn’t rightly read it. By the time he checked up on us, we’d put ‘Roi de Paris’
on a thousand bottles.”

“King of Paris.” Ruth shook her head. “Anybody else would have beaten us black and blue for a mistake like that, but what did Father do? Laughed and laughed till it seemed he would never stop.” She glanced over her shoulder into the workshop. That wasn’t just a cold dead body lying back there; it was their own dear father.

“I didn’t laugh when I had to tell Strobel what we’d done, mind you,” Johanna said bitterly. “It was only the third time I’d ever been into Sonneberg on my own, and I had no idea how to talk business. I was all of sixteen years old, and I stood there stammering away. I was sure he wasn’t going to take those bottles.”

“You talked him round somehow, though.” There was a trace of awe in Marie’s voice, even after all this time. “A few weeks later Strobel gave you another order, with ‘Roi de Paris’
on every single bottle!”

“Ha! I daresay he sold them to the French at twice the price and claimed the new name was all his own idea!” Ruth wrinkled her nose. “How I longed for a bottle of French perfume for myself! I used to dream about it. One morning I woke up and thought I could smell it in the room. Lilac and lily of the valley.” She sighed.

“If Father had had his way, you would have gotten a bottle,” Johanna replied. “He made me go and ask Strobel whether he could get hold of some perfume for us. I didn’t think much of that idea—what does a fourteen-year-old girl need with perfume, after all?—but Father always did what he could to make you happy.”

Ruth looked as though she wanted to answer back, but she bit back her words.

They each sat there with their own thoughts. There were so many stories.

Ruth’s head nodded forward onto her chest, once, then twice, but when Johanna suggested that they take turns with the wake so that they could get some sleep, Ruth and Marie refused. Not long after that, however, Ruth’s head sank forward onto the table, and Marie’s did the same. Johanna sighed. They would have been more comfortable if they’d gone to bed.

She stood up quietly, not moving her chair. She was exhausted herself. She took a candle and went into the workshop. Her gaze lingered on her father’s workbench and lamp. The tools that lay there were worn smooth with use, apart from the gleaming silver pipe that connected their house to the new gasworks. It shone in the candlelight, and Johanna felt a pang of pain in her breast. She had worked so hard to persuade Joost to have that pipe put in. Father had never liked change. If it had been up to him, he would have spent the rest of his life blowing glass over an oil lamp.

Why now?
she wanted to scream out into the dark sky above. Her eyelids burned. She took a deep breath.

But once he had gotten used to the “newfangled nonsense,” he had been so proud! The gas flame was hotter than the old lamp, and he could blow bottles and test tubes with much thinner walls. From then on not an evening passed down at the Black Eagle when he didn’t try to persuade the last few glassblowers who were not on the gas mains that it was the only way to work.

Her father. She would miss him so. Her heart was a gaping wound.

Their mother had died when she was eleven, Ruth was nine, and Marie seven. For a whole year they hadn’t been able to sleep unless Joost left a lamp burning in their room all night. Every evening he would tell them how beautiful it was up in heaven, how happy Mother was there. It became part of their bedtime routine, instead of prayers. And every night the girls took turns getting up out of bed to go check on Father. They had been so afraid that he would leave them too. He had been kind and patient with them, and at last the fear faded away. But now it was back, seeking to devour her, swallow her whole. Johanna fought it as she looked down at her father’s face in the candlelight, her heart heavy with love. Joost had spent years teaching them to be strong, and his lessons would not be in vain.

Joost Steinmann. The widower whose daughters had ruled the roost. One evening at the Black Eagle one of the men had dared to tease Joost for having fathered three girls but never a boy in all those years. He had ended up with a black eye for his pains, and couldn’t see straight for a week. “Why do I need sons?” Joost always said. “Steinmann girls are worth twice any boy in the village!” Johanna swallowed hard.

She looked at him and stroked his cheek. “I don’t know what we’ll do now,” she whispered. “But I promise you one thing.” Her hand felt hot against his cold skin, and she had to steel herself to keep it there. “We won’t make you ashamed. When you look down from heaven at us, you’ll be proud of what you see!”

By morning, Johanna had cried all the tears she had. While Ruth and Marie sat by the dead man’s bedside, she went up to sleep for a few hours. She woke up a little before noon. There was still a lot to be done before Joost’s funeral.