The American Lady(85)

At the moment I’m busy blazing new trails in glasswork. I’ll write you more about that some other time. Unfortunately that means that I still haven’t gotten very far with my designs for the next Steinmann-Maienbaum catalog. But I fully intend to return to them in the next few days.

I hope you had a pleasant journey and that you have found your feet in Lauscha by now. If I know you, you’re fizzing over with new ideas and you have the whole village in a state of excitement. I’m looking forward so much to hearing whether you find the place just as I had described it to you. I know how much this visit means to you, and my thoughts will be with you when you walk up the main street for the first time to visit your father’s house. Or have you already done that by now?

Dearest Wanda, whatever you are doing now, I am sure that you are blazing new trails just as I am.

Your Aunt Marie

PS: If you happen to go to Sonneberg, please be so good as to visit Mr. Sawatzky and give him my very best regards. Tell him that I finally managed to break my shackles—he will know exactly what that means.



Blazing new trails . . .

“So much for that,” Wanda said with a sob, which led straight into another coughing fit. A fine spray of spittle landed on the unfamiliar coat of arms at the top of the sheet of creamy writing paper.

She had been confined to her bed since the end of October. What had started out as a cold had turned into raging bronchitis within just a few days. At night she was wracked by coughing fits for hours on end and nothing seemed to help, neither the sage tea that Johanna brewed for her nor the bitter dark-brown herbal concoction the doctor gave her as a cough syrup when he looked in on her every few days. All she had seen of Lauscha so far was the doctor’s face with his bushy eyebrows and surprisingly sensuous, almost womanly lips. He had muttered to Johanna as he left that her niece needed to rest undisturbed and that he feared the worst if she tried to leave her bed. Even without this warning, though, Wanda hardly felt like going out to see the village, given that she could barely make it as far as the outhouse. She spent her days in a sort of haze, only dimly aware of what else was going on in the house. The front doorbell seemed to ring all day long, and there were always visitors coming and going—she could hear their footsteps in the hallway. Once Wanda thought she could hear snatches of English conversation. She decided to ask her aunt whether she had heard right, but by the time Johanna next looked in on her she had already forgotten the question.

The worst thing about getting sick wasn’t that her chest felt like a bubbling volcano spitting gouts of lava as it burned her up from the inside, or the fever that had her sweating one moment and shivering the next. The worst thing was Anna’s reaction. Wanda was staying in Anna’s room, and Anna sighed in quiet exasperation when Wanda’s coughing kept her awake at night. She cast glances of furious, silent recrimination at Wanda when she had to hobble downstairs to the workshop in the morning while Wanda stayed in bed and often slept through the morning without coughing once. Wanda offered again and again to sleep somewhere else—for all she cared they could make her up a bed in the attic—but Johanna wouldn’t hear of it. Quite the opposite: she thought it was a good thing Anna was with Wanda at night in case her fever suddenly spiked or there was some other emergency.

Wanda remembered what a fool she had made of herself about the room when she first arrived, and she still blushed at the thought.

“And this is Anna’s room,” her aunt had said, opening the door with a flourish and putting one of Wanda’s suitcases in the middle of the floor. Wanda had been a little surprised to see a second bed there, of course. But she had assumed it must have been left over from childhood days—perhaps the bed where the dolls had sat lined up in a row. So she had asked, “It’s very nice, but where’s my room?” Johanna had looked at her wide-eyed and probably thought the question was a joke.

Mother and daughter had spent weeks taking turns making poultices for Wanda’s throat, boiling up onions with rock candy, which tasted horrible but soothed her cough for a while at least, and bringing her bowl after bowl of hot chicken soup. Wanda let them do whatever they liked. Her charm had quite collapsed in the face of the fever. She couldn’t even manage a joke or a cheerful remark to draw the sting from the situation. Everything she had lived for in the weeks leading up to her journey had fallen apart. She had yearned to help her family and instead was nothing but a burden. Wanda wished she could just make herself invisible. Since she couldn’t do that, she settled for keeping as quiet as she could.