The Glassblower (3 page)

4

“Gone at last!” Ruth had been scrubbing the front step with a cloth. Now she stood up and threw it into the sink with the pile of dishes still waiting to be washed. Then she flopped down onto the bench next to Marie and Johanna.

It was late afternoon. Usually they would be bent over their workbenches at that hour, but the funeral had taken place at two o’clock that day. Although it had been pouring rain, so many mourners had come to the churchyard that Johanna had worried that all the breads and cakes in the house would not be enough for the guests. Most of them, however, had said their good-byes at the graveside and gone back to work. Only their closest neighbors came home with the sisters to drink a cup or two of coffee and reminisce about Joost. They had hung up their wet coats in the front hall, and the hooks almost gave way beneath the weight. Soon the whole house had smelled of wet cloth and great puddles spread out on the hall floor. Widow Grün had helped Ruth in the kitchen, but the two of them could hardly keep the kettle boiling fast enough to make all the coffee. A funeral was thirsty work; everyone knew that. Once all the cakes and sandwiches had been eaten and the air in the house grew fusty, the guests said good-bye, one after another. Peter Maienbaum had been the last to leave. He stood there with his hand on the door handle, looking at the empty workshop as though he still had trouble accepting that Joost had died so unexpectedly.

“It’s so quiet in here all of a sudden.” Marie looked about as though she could hardly believe it was all over.

Johanna nodded. Nobody wanting another cup of coffee, nobody looking at her with concern in their eyes.

“It was so kind of Swiss Karl to bring that glass rose,” Marie said.

The others nodded.

Karl Flein had spent years in the Swiss Alps as a young man, so the other glassblowers called him Swiss Karl. While the others put fresh flowers onto the coffin, he had brought a rose made of glass, which he had blown himself. Johanna couldn’t help but think that a burial was no place for flowers, real or glass.

“And Wilhelm Heimer spoke from his heart,” she said.

“He did,” Ruth agreed. “I got a lump in my throat when he said that he always felt he shared a burden with Father because they both became widowers so young.”

“I was surprised that Heimer came at all. It’s not like him to let the lamp go cold.” Johanna made a face. The gas flames were always burning at the Heimer family home on the hillside, long past when all the other lights in the village were out. Some thought that Wilhelm Heimer worked too hard, while others were envious that he had so many orders to fill. He could take on the extra work because he had three sons, all of them hard workers and skilled glassblowers.

“Why did it have to rain, today of all days?” Ruth complained.

“I would have liked it even less if the sun had been shining,” Marie replied. “Imagine being buried under a clear blue sky with the sun blazing down. No, better to have the clouds weep along with the mourners.”

None of them could think of anything more to say after that. They had talked over all the details while the guests were still there: Father’s death, the burial itself, the turn that the weather had taken after weeks and weeks of sunshine, the way the priest had stumbled over his words at the graveside, so that many of the mourners thought he might have had a little too much of the communion wine. They’d had enough talk.

Johanna stared at the piles of dishes. The fire was still burning in the oven. She could put some water on to heat, and then wash the dishes. She jumped to her feet before either of her sisters had the same idea. Marie stood at her elbow and pulled each dripping plate from the water, then piled them all up on the table. Once everything was clean, Marie and Ruth dragged the tub of dishwater out into the yard and tipped it out. Johanna began to clear the shelves of the sideboard where they kept their crockery. “High time I gave this a good clean,” she declared when the other two cast questioning glances at her. Ruth picked up her embroidery, and Marie took out the dress that she had begun sewing a couple of days before. Yet no sooner did they have their work on the table in front of them than they folded their hands in their laps and just sat there.

When they finally went upstairs, it was almost completely dark outside. None of them dared to look into the abandoned workshop.

When Ruth woke up the next morning it was still raining. She lit the gas lamp in the kitchen and went to the pantry, just like any other morning, to take out the potatoes they had boiled the night before. She was going to peel them and slice them for the pan. Then she stopped in her tracks, her hand on the china knob of the pantry door.

They hadn’t boiled the potatoes last night.

This was not a morning like any other.

Her eyes stinging, she ran from the kitchen out to the laundry shed. Her arm surged up and down as she pumped water into the basin, working the handle so hard that it clattered and jumped. The water spilled over the basin’s blue enamel rim, but Ruth didn’t notice. She only stopped when it splashed onto her feet. She let out a loud sob, standing there in the damp shed.

By the time she came back to the kitchen, Johanna and Marie were already sitting at the table. One of them had gotten bread from the pantry, along with a pat of butter and the honey jar. They sat there chewing their bread in silence. None of them tasted the sweetness of honey in their mouths for they each had the same bitter question on the tip of their tongue: “What shall we do now?”

It went on raining for the next few days, and inside the house it was like Sleeping Beauty’s castle once more. Each sister crept into her own quiet corner, idling the days away and hoping that it would be bedtime soon. Peter looked in from time to time, but he never stayed long. Unlike the girls, he had work to do. And though he was ashamed to admit it to himself, every time he visited the Steinmanns, he was happy to leave again and escape the gloom in that house.

Another meal had passed in silence. Johanna suddenly looked up and cleared her throat. “I think it’s best if we go and clear away Father’s things now.”

Ruth frowned. “I don’t kno
w . . .
shouldn’t we wait a little while yet?”

“I suppose it makes no difference if we do it now or in
a . . .
” Johanna began, her eyes darting from one to the other, as though hoping that one of them would talk her out of the idea.

Ruth realized that Johanna no more wanted to tackle such a dreary job than she did. But it would be hard no matter when they did it. Quite apart from that, she didn’t know how long she could bear this dreadful silence in the house. Better a dreary job than nothing at all to do.

“You’re right; it’s time to tidy up a little.”

Ruth and Johanna were upstairs folding shirts and jackets, making neat bundles that they wrapped in linen, but downstairs the neighbors continued to come knocking. Even a week after Joost’s death, they still came by with food. One woman had just brought them a pot of soup, peering over Marie’s shoulder as she handed it over. How were the orphaned girls getting along? Three young women, on their ow
n . . .
that was a rarity in the village. Marie quickly realized that the old busybody would have liked to come in and look around, but she shut the door as soon as she thanked the visitor for the gift.

As Marie looked for somewhere to put the soup down, the lid of the pot slipped a little. A sharp, sour smell assailed her nose. Marie shuddered. Perhaps the soup was already spoiled? She wondered for a moment whether she should just tip it out behind the house, but then decided to put it aside for the time being. Looking for somewhere to put it down, she carried the pot through the kitchen and into the workshop, where she set it on one of the empty workbenches.

She was just about to go out again when she stopped in her tracks.

How quiet it was here!

Marie drew up a stool and sat down.

No ghosts. But it was as though the silence were haunted all the same. Day after day, the flame singing in the lamp had been the sound of their lives. “If you want the flame to sing, you have to blow hard, give it a lot of air,” Father always said. Marie felt her throat tighten. She ran her fingers lovingly over the old oil lamp where it stood abandoned next to the new gas pipe. The flame would never sing here again.

She heard a sound upstairs. Tidy up, Ruth had said—but they were talking about Father’s life!

When she had asked what she could do while the two of them worked up there, her sisters looked at one another in panic. What could they do? Ever since Father had died, the question had been everywhere in the house, unspoken but so loud that Marie felt almost deafened by it. Although she didn’t have any idea either what they should do next, she felt hurt that Ruth and Johanna didn’t even want to include her in their discussions. Just because she was the youngest, they never took her seriously. Father had treated her as a child, and now Ruth and Johanna were doing the same. But there was nothing she could do about it. She stood up with a sigh and went back to the kitchen.

Around noon, Widow Grün came calling with an apple cake. The scent of cinnamon and aniseed wafted up the stairs and drove out the smell of their father’s old clothes. While other neighbors had brought pot after pot of casserole—which the sisters ate without enthusiasm—the fresh-baked cake brought back their appetite.

“We have to thank Widow Grün again for all she’s done for us,” Johanna declared as she sliced it.

“We really must,” Ruth agreed. “The way she helped me wash Father as we laid him out—not everyone would have done that.”

“It just doesn’t seem like her to make herself so useful. She generally likes to mind her own busines
s . . .
”

“It is odd, isn’t i
t . . .
She only lives two doors down, but we hardly ever see her,” Marie chimed in.

Everybody in Lauscha knew all about their neighbors’ comings and goings, and not only because it was a small village where almost everybody was in the same line of work. It was hard to keep anything secret in a place where all the houses were lined up side by side like pearls on a string. The main street twisted and turned as it climbed the mountainside, and there were hardly any side streets at all—the steep forested slopes all around saw to that. This part of Thuringia had changed little over the years, and the houses stood huddled together the way they had for centuries.