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 know . . . 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 own . . . 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 business . . .”
“It is odd, isn’t it . . . 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.
“How do you ever expect to see Widow Grün when she’s up at the Heimers’ house working all day?” Ruth answered. “She probably has no time to sit down and gossip.”
Johanna shook her head. “Griseldis always did keep herself to herself, even when Josef Grün was alive. I don’t think he much liked it when she chatted with the neighbors. He was an old soak!”
“Whatever happened to their son?” Ruth asked, between bites of cake. “What was his name, Magnus?”
“I’ve no idea. He just cleared out and left one day. Nobody seems to know where he went, or why. But I was only thirteen when it happened, so . . .” There was a knock at the door, and Johanna fell quiet.
“Not more food,” Ruth groaned.
But it was Peter, who asked Johanna to step outside with him. Marie and Ruth looked at one another meaningfully.
5
Peter shut the door behind them. “And? Is everything all right?”
Johanna shrugged.
“I’m sorry I haven’t come to see you these past two days, but I’ve had a lot of visitors.”
Peter Maienbaum made glass eyes. Some of his customers came from far away. When someone needed a glass eye after an accident, time was of the essence. The longer the delay, the greater the danger that the eye socket would become inflamed or even suppurate once the false eye was in. But if an eye was fitted right away, there was a good chance that the muscles would accept it, perhaps even learn to move it around.
“There’s no need to apologize. After all, you’ve done more than anyone to look after us,” Johanna reassured him.
“That was the other thing I wanted to talk to you about.” Peter shuffled his feet, embarrassed. “You see . . . I’d love to buy your father’s tools and his stock of raw glass . . . but the truth is, none of that’s any use to me!”
Johanna tried to smile. “Oh, I know that. You get your stock when they make colored glass down at the foundry. You don’t have any need for our clear and brown glass.” She put a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t worry about us. You can’t get rid of us that easily.” Gallows humor. She gave him a light shove. “We won’t starve, that’s for sure—you should see all the food that people have brought round. It’s as though there were ten of us in the house, not just three.”
He looked at her skeptically. “Food’s only the half of it. You need money as well. And work. Even with all the goodwill in the world, I don’t know how you’re going to manage!”
Johanna sighed. “Nor do we. We were just clearing away Father’s things. He’ll have put some money aside for a rainy day, and we can use that for the time being.” So far though they had found nothing of the sort, and she couldn’t imagine where else they might look for it.
“There are still some boxes of finished wares in your workshop. Should I take them to Sonneberg for you?”
“No, I’ll take care of that myself,” Johanna said hastily. “To be honest with you, I’ll be happy to get out of the house for a day. Anyway, what would Friedhelm Strobel say if you showed up with our wares! Even if it’s raining cats and dogs tomorrow, I’ll go to Sonneberg and sell what we have.” She sighed. “I really should have done it last Friday. But it was so soon after Father died.”
“Strobel had better not try any tricks, or he’ll have me to answer to. You tell him that. And”—he put a hand under her chin—“if you have any trouble with anything at all, just come to me for help. Will you promise me that?” he asked, fixing her with his gaze.
She turned away. Something in her fought against the very idea of making such a promise, harmless though it may have been. Instead she said, “We’ll manage somehow.” Although it sounded vague, she didn’t want Peter to feel responsible for them, for her in particular. She squeezed his arm, gave him a friendly nod, and then walked back into the house. For a moment she toyed with the idea of creeping upstairs to bed. All this talking wore her out, and she was tired of having to pretend to be in charge the whole time. Why didn’t the others notice? But then she pulled herself together—she could hardly leave her sisters sitting downstairs on their own.
“What did Peter want?” Ruth burst out before Johanna had even closed the door.
All at once Johanna felt butterflies in her stomach. Strange. She had stood in the doorway just like this, back on that fateful Monday. She pulled herself together before the grief could settle on her shoulders again like a black shawl. They had to talk about their future. There was no getting around it.
“Peter said that he would like to buy Father’s tools and the stock of glass, but unfortunately it’s not what he needs.”
“Maybe one of the other glassblowers will buy up the stock?” Marie asked.
Ruth sighed. “I don’t know . . . It wouldn’t seem right to me to just get rid of it all like that. It makes everything seem so final.”
“But that’s just what I mean!” Marie said, raising her voice. “Now that Father’s gone, we won’t be blowing any more glass.” She put her hand to her mouth. “Whatever will become of us?”
Johanna didn’t know what to say. Ever since Father had died, she had thought a good deal about how they would cope. She had put on a brave face for Peter, but in truth her confidence was as hollow as the glass beads that half the village made and sold.
Without someone in the house to blow the glass, they had nothing to live on. Without someone to blow the glass, they wouldn’t grind the stoppers, paint the labels, or pack the wares. Those few skills that they had were of no use at all.
“Tomorrow I’ll go to Sonneberg to sell the last few things that we have. It’s just some jars and tubes, and it won’t fetch much, but we can live off that for a while. We can’t rely on people bringing us food forever after all.” Johanna looked at Ruth, who seemed to be off in a daydream somewhere, and decided to speak plainly. There was no sense trying to soften the blow. “I’ve looked in every nook and cranny in Father’s room, but it looks like he didn’t put aside any savings. Putting in the gas pipes probably cost him everything he had.” She bit her lip. It was still so hard to believe.
“Maybe the gasworks will give us that money back if we tell them we aren’t using the gas?” Marie asked quietly.
Ruth frowned. That was typical of Marie. “You can’t really believe that! Don’t you remember that their men had to spend three days digging a trench to lay the pipes? That’s where the money went. We can’t just turn up and ask for it back!” She nonetheless cast a glance at Johanna with a glimmer of hope in her eyes.
Her older sister shook her head. “They won’t hear of it. No, we’ll just have to use whatever Friedhelm Strobel gives us to get by until something turns up.”
The hope in Ruth’s eyes died away. “If only we had a man about the house to help us! Someone who could take over Father’s bench and lamp.”
“And who would that be?” Johanna laughed bitterly. “The other glassblowers all have their own work to take care of. And anyway—how would we pay him, whoever it was?”
Marie looked as though she wanted to say something, but she kept quiet for fear of being told off again.
“We’ll have to hope that someone takes us on as hired hands. If the Widow Grün can work that way, then so can we,” Johanna said. They could hear in her voice how little she enjoyed the prospect of doing such a thing. Hired hands earned even less than a maid; everyone knew that. They had to work ten hours a day, even more, just to get by.
Her sisters didn’t say a word, but she could hear their skepticism all the same. There were only a few workshops in the village that even took on hired help, and so far none of them had come offering work.
“There’s another way we could get a glassblower into the house . . .” Ruth grinned. “Maybe we should think of marrying! It’s not a bad idea given our current situation, is it?” She sat up straight, as though she were about to grab paper and pencil and draw up a list of candidates.
Johanna and Marie looked at each other, downcast. They didn’t know if their sister was serious.
“And where are you going to conjure up three eligible bachelors?” Marie asked.
Ruth didn’t seem to notice the sarcasm in Marie’s voice. Pursing her lips, she replied, “Well, that is a problem. Father was very fierce with them all. If we don’t get a move on, all the lads in the village will be spoken for, and we’ll end up as old maids. All the other girls have been engaged for ages!” There was an undertow of panic in her voice.
Johanna could hardly believe her ears. “What are you blathering about?”
“I’m not blathering, it’s the truth,” Ruth shot back. “One or two of the men who are getting married caught my eye as well, let me tell you. And there were some good glassblowers among them. But since Father never even let us go down to the foundry square, how could we ever have caught a man’s eye? I daresay they’ve all written us off!”
The young men of the village often gathered down on the foundry square after work. While great bursts of flame shot out from the furnaces inside the foundry, the girls sat outside on the low wall and giggled. The boys stood by the wall, digging one another in the ribs, cracking jokes, or smoking cigarettes that more often than not made their eyes water. The boys and girls traded glances—appraising, amorous or scornful, flirtatious or brazen, or even downright shameless. Some were all smiles and elegance, while others made fools of themselves.
Johanna never felt that she had missed out on anything by not going down there. Quite the opposite; she hated the way the young men gawped as she walked through the village with Ruth and Marie. And Ruth had always claimed that she would rather wait for a Polish prince or a Russian nobleman to come courting than walk out with one of the clumsy boys from the foundry square. Johanna reminded her of what she had s
o often said.
“Maybe those were just a young girl’s daydreams,” Ruth said, waving a hand dismissively. “I don’t want life to pass me by. Do you think I enjoy being stuck here in the house and only ever doing chores? I want to wear pretty things the way the other girls do. And I want to sing with the choir, or join in the theater shows where they wear such splendid costumes! Or even just go to the fair one of these days. Who knows, maybe that’s where I’ll meet my prince. But it certainly won’t happen if we just shut ourselves away like hermits!”
Johanna gazed at her sister, aghast. All of a sudden she felt she knew far too little about what Ruth wanted in life.
“But we can’t just go out in the street and find a man to marry, easy as that!” Marie’s skepticism broke the sudden silence. “I can’t think of anyone who wants to marry us!”
Johanna sighed again. Sometimes Marie was just too naive.
“I can, but it’s not me he wants to marry . . .” Ruth laughed. “Who keeps paying us neighborly calls, and wanting to talk to one of us alone?”
Marie giggled.
Johanna rolled her eyes. It was hardly news that Ruth thought that she and Peter were more than just friends. She thought of him as a big brother, someone she could talk to without having to mind her words. “Peter’s a good friend. To all of us!” she said, although she didn’t want to talk about it.
“Maybe you think he’s just a friend. You think he just spends his days making false eyes for others . . .” Ruth raised her eyebrows and paused meaningfully. “But he’s making real eyes at you!” she burst out, giggling.
“That’s an awful joke!” Marie snapped at her. “I think Peter’s very nice. But who could ever think of marrying a man whose family name means maypole?” And she broke into giggles as well.
The Glassblower (The Glassblower Trilogy Book 1) Page 3
