The Glassblower (The Glassblower Trilogy Book 1)

by Durst-Benning, Petra

  “That may be true for the common herd,” Strobel said dismissively. “However, there are also true connoisseurs who are man enough to want to take on a strong woman. And I’m not just talking about business here . . .” he added, drawing out his words.

  The conversation had taken an unpleasant turn. At the very least, it was becoming personal. Embarrassed, Johanna picked at her fish, which lay untouched on her plate. There were a thousand questions she wanted to ask about his travel plans, but she didn’t know how to change the subject. “Most men don’t care for it when a woman has opinions of her own. Never mind a strong will,” she replied sharply.

  Strobel shrugged.

  “As I have said, there are men, and there are men. I like it very well indeed when a woman shows her dominance. In my experience, a man may even find great”—he hesitated for a moment, as if looking for the right word—“pleasure in submitting to such a woman. Putting himself into her hands. Of course both the man and the woman must show certain qualities, but this is not quite so rare as you may think. The phenomenon can even be found in many works of world literature. Perhaps I should give you one such work to read.”

  His mood brightened suddenly. “Yes, that’s an excellent idea,” he said, greatly pleased with himself.

  Johanna frowned. What on earth was Strobel talking about? She cleared her throat and pointed at the fish with her fork.

  “Perhaps you could show me again how to get the bones out? Otherwise I’ll be sitting here till midnight with this plaice!”

  Strobel watched thoughtfully as Johanna vanished into the dark hallway.

  She had shied away so quickly when the conversation became personal that he had no doubt that she was still a virgin. All the same, he was certain that she had at least an idea of what he had been talking about.

  He poured himself more champagne but did not drink it. His thoughts were so tantalizing that he needed no further stimulation.

  Johanna, his assistant. And his key to freedom.

  In less than three weeks it would be done; he would travel to B. while his business thrived under her care. He shifted about on his chair in a fever of anticipation. A kaleidoscope of gruesome yet gorgeous visions unfolded before his mind’s eye. In his eagerness he didn’t even notice at first that some of these images were of Johanna and no one else. Then he heard himself laugh.

  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 a
t 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?”