The Glassblower (7 page)

11

Marie painted in her dreams all night, and when she woke up the next morning, she could hardly wait to get back to work. She was all the more disappointed, then, when Wilhelm Heimer put her to work with Sarah decorating perfume bottles.

She cast an envious glance at Ruth, who was sitting next to Eva today. She probably didn’t know how lucky she was! In front of Marie were thick bundles of glittering wire, the tinsel that Johanna and the Widow Grün had cut into lengths yesterday. Reluctantly she picked up a bundle. Upon closer inspection, she had to admit that the curly, shimmering wire had its own particular charm; its warm golden tint glowed or faded, depending on how the light fell on it. The perfume flasks themselves were pretty as well. They were the same shape as the ones that Father had blown for the French consignment, but they were all made of colored glass—violet, blue, and green—from the stock that Heimer had from the glass foundry. Marie had never seen this shade of violet before. The gloomy cloud that hovered over her head lifted a little. This part of the job could never give her the same pleasure as painting with those lovely colors, but decorating work had a certain appeal.

She watched cheerfully as Sarah wound the glittering wire round and round the belly of a perfume flask until it had made a kind of cage about the bottle.

“There, you see, that’s how you do it,” Sarah said, picking up the next bottle just as placidly as if she were chopping firewood.

Marie was horrified. Wrapped around as thickly as that, the tinsel wire lost all its delicate charm! And the bottle itself could barely be seen. The glass was no longer transparent and the colors might just as well have been the dreadful dull brown of a beer bottle.

Marie could have wept.

Ruth was secretly glad when Heimer put her to work with Eva at the painting bench, for she thought it would give her the opportunity to find out more about Thomas from his sister-in-law. And she was sitting much closer to him than when she had been at the packing table on the other side of the room. So far, however, neither had been advantages; certainly Eva never stopped jabbering, but since she seemed to regard herself as the most important member of the Heimer family, most of her stories were about herself. She hadn’t mentioned Thomas even once. Ruth was beginning to lose patience.

“When I found out they had a housekeeper here, I was so surprised!” Eva said, so caught up in her story that her cheeks were glowing. “Edel is an old woman, of course, but she takes care of so much of the work that there’s nothing left for me to do! My mother always told me, ‘My child, you must take what you can get in this life! It’s little enough.’ ” Her eyes gleamed. “Well, I certainly made a good choice here,” she went on, with unmistakable pride in her voice. “Look at this dress. Sebastian gave it to me just last week.” She held up her sleeve right under Ruth’s nose. “Bouclé silk—it must have been expensive!”

Ruth pursed her lips. What a silly, self-satisfied cow! All the same, she couldn’t resist running her fingertips over the silky fabric. “It feels wonderful.”

Eva beamed. “My mother always said, ‘My chil
d . . .
’ ”

Ruth took a deep breath. She didn’t want to hear any more of Eva’s mother’s wisdom. She cast a yearning glance toward the workbenches with the lamps, where Thomas looked very focused on his work.

Just like the day before, he and his brothers had been bent over their lamps already when the Steinmann sisters arrived. Thomas had only looked up briefly and nodded.

Disappointed, Ruth looked down at herself. Thomas hadn’t even glanced at her blue blouse, which hugged her figure so nicely and was something she usually only wore on special occasions. She had expected Johanna to make some comment when she took the blouse from the wardrobe and was surprised when she’d said nothing.

Ruth decided to try again. “How did you meet Sebastian?” she whispered, silently hoping that Eva wouldn’t include half the room in her answer.

Eva laughed. “That’s quite a story. I was on my way home from the slate quarry with my father and three of my brothers when our old nag collapsed in the middle of the road. It was on its last legs, you know. Anyway it was just lying there, and we were standing around wondering how we were ever going to get all the slates back home when Sebastian came by. An
d . . .
”

So it had been blind luck. Eva had no new insights that might help her with Thomas. Ruth switched off the stream of chatter in her ears, like switching off a gas lamp.
An
d . . .
an
d . . .
an
d . . .
she thought, rather unkindly. Nobody would call Eva a skilled storyteller. She dipped her brush into the pot so roughly that a couple of drops spilled over the side.

“Be careful, you clumsy coot!” Eva hissed at her like a scalded cat. “Wilhelm doesn’t like any paint being wasted.”

Ruth snorted, but then realized how unladylike that must have sounded. If Thomas had happened to have looked up from his lamp just the
n . . .

She forced a smile. “I’ll learn soon enough. Not everyone can be as good as you with the brush.”

Johanna was walking past them right at that moment with a load of new glass pipes in her arms, and she raised an eyebrow questioningly. Ruth made a face at her. Nothing got past Johanna!

Eva, however, didn’t seem to have noticed the sarcasm in Ruth’s remark. Instead, reassured, she favored her new workmate with a graceful smile. “Do you know what? I’ll show you how to do it again. It’s all in how you turn the brush.”

There was potato salad for lunch again, just like the day before. Edeltraud brought a second dish full of chopped herring. The heads and tails were still in there, piled up in a grotesque heap with the fleshy middle bits, and the sour smell of the pickling brine hung over the whole table. The others once again washed down their meal with plentiful helpings of beer.

Johanna found when she took a spoonful of potato salad that it had taken on the fishy taste of the herring. Perhaps if she took some from right at the edge of the platter, lower down the sid
e . . .
Before she could do anything about it, she had a whole heap of potato on her spoon.

“Oh yes, old Edel knows what she’s about! Everybody likes her cooking!” Wilhelm Heimer beamed when he saw how much Johanna had on her spoon.

Not knowing what else to do, she swallowed the lot.

“Well then, what’s it like joining our workshop from your house, where you girls used to rule the roost?” he asked, chewing. “Not that there was anything wrong with how Joost used to run his workshop,” he added jovially.

“There’s a lot to get used to, of course,” Johanna answered diplomatically. Heimer looked at her expectantly, so she went on. “We used to blow far fewer shapes. Just pharmacy jars, really.” She hurriedly bit into a slice of bread.

“Oh yes, there’s hardly an outfit in the whole village that does as many different lines as ours. I would never have dreamed just a few years ago that I would have five pairs of hired hands.” Heimer was not far from giving himself a slap on the shoulder.

Johanna made an effort to smile.

“If anybody could do it, you could!” Eva told her father-in-law with a twinkle in her eye. He laughed, and little bits of potato salad leapt about on his tongue.

Disgusted, Johanna turned away. The way Eva piled on the flattery! And then some devilish impulse made her clear her throat and say, “It’s certainly impressive how many different things you do here.”

Wilhelm’s face was as round and happy as a balloon.

“But there are one or two changes you could make to work more efficiently.”

The balloon went pop. The air escaped.

There was a deathly silence over the table. Not even a spoon clinked. Johanna felt the hairs stand up at the nape of her neck. That hadn’t been a good idea, her instinct told her a moment too late.

“What do you mean?” Wilhelm Heimer asked calmly.

Perhaps Johanna should have followed Ruth’s advice at that moment—her sister was gesturing as unobtrusively as she could for Johanna to pipe down. And the look in Eva’s eyes—visible enjoyment at the prospect of someone ending up in Heimer’s bad books—should have warned her as well.

But Johanna was so caught up in her own ideas that she didn’t notice. “Of course it’s only my second day here, but I did notice that we lose a lot of time carrying the finished wares from the painting bench to the packing table. Because the silvering bench is in between, you see. And every time we need new glass stock, it has to come up from the cellar—” She fell silent as she saw Heimer’s face growing redder and redder.

“Let’s make one thing clear, Johanna Steinman
n . . .
” He had narrowed his eyes so that they almost disappeared behind the puffy lids. “I took the three of you on and gave you work because it was a duty I owed your father. Not everyone would be so high-minded!”

Thomas Heimer was the only one still eating. The others sat there as though rooted to their chairs. Nobody moved.

“But if any one of you thinks that the women will ever get to rule the roost in my house, you can think again!” Heimer slammed his fist down on the table and made the dishes jump. “If you don’t like the way I do things, you can leave!”

“That’s not what Johanna meant,” Eva broke in, her voice as smooth as silk. She stroked Heimer’s arm as though she were calming a savage bull. “She only said that because she’s not as quick about her work as I am, or the Widow Grün. Isn’t that right, Johanna?” she asked, tilting her chin toward her.

The sparkle in Eva’s eyes was more than Johanna could bear. She looked over at Ruth, but found no reassurance there either—rather, a glance of irritation.

“I didn’t mean to criticize anybody,” she said at last. “It just takes a while to get used to new things, that’s all.” She spoke much more demurely than she would have liked. For goodness’ sake, she just wanted to be allowed to speak her mind! If Father had blown up at her like this every time she had made some observation, she would have left home long ago.

Wilhelm Heimer seemed to accept her apology. He grumbled something unintelligible as he took a tail from the herring dish and stuck it into his mouth.

That evening too, the oven went unlit in the Steinmann house. The sisters had been at work for ten hours, and none of them felt like fetching the wood and building a fire.

The mood among them was just as chilly. Neither Ruth nor Marie was ready to forgive Johanna for having put their jobs on the line by speaking out of turn. Too tired to argue, they ate in silence, trading awkward glances every few bites.

They went to bed shortly after. But instead of chattering excitedly as they had the night before, each was silent with her own thoughts.