Her cousin Johannes and her uncle Peter looked in on her twice a day—after lunch and at the end of the workday—and Magnus came by every few days. The men mostly shifted awkwardly from foot to foot for a few minutes and then left. What could they say to Wanda, really, to cheer her up? She was a complete stranger who had just happened to turn up in their house and then fall ill. They hadn’t even had the chance to get to know one another. All the presents that Wanda had brought with her were still in the luggage, and she hadn’t had the strength to do anything more than unpack the photographs and letters that her mother had given her for Johanna. She had expected that her aunt would look through them and then sit down on her bed for a chat about Ruth, New York, and Marie—but she hoped in vain. Johanna seemed to have time for many things but not for a conversation with her.
“The last few months of the year are always our busiest time. All our clients suddenly realize that they haven’t ordered enough Christmas decorations,” she had explained to Wanda once, when her niece hesitantly asked whether she could keep her company for a little while. “We have to cope with all these last-minute orders somehow and get everything produced and delivered!” Wanda had asked whether other workshops had the same trouble—maybe that was why her father still hadn’t given any sign of knowing she was there. There had been no letter or even a message, never mind a visit. Johanna had looked at her rather oddly and explained that the workshops that dealt in Christmas wares were the ones most flooded with work; everyone else would be having an easier time of it. Wanda had tried to fight back her disappointment.
Her only contact with the outside world in all these weeks had been two letters from New York, in which Ruth ordered her to fit in and not to upset things.
And now there was this letter from Marie. It had arrived that morning, along with a letter for Johanna and a few more documents, in a thick envelope from Genoa.
Tears ran down Wanda’s cheeks as she read Marie’s words from Genoa, where “art and life go hand in hand” and she was “busy blazing new trails in glasswork.” Why did other people have all the luck?
Four weeks to the day after she had arrived in Lauscha, the doctor finally declared that Wanda could leave her bed for a couple of hours every day. Johanna suggested that she spend the time sitting on the kitchen bench watching Lugiana cook, but Wanda said that she wanted to help in the workshop. Johanna was already immersed in lists and account books and wasn’t even listening, while Anna rolled her eyes as if to say, More fuss and bother for our American visitor. Uncle Peter gently suggested that the chemical fumes wouldn’t be good for Wanda in her current state of health. It was Johannes who asked his father, “Why don’t we put Wanda at the packing table with the hired hands? They could use the help!”
Wanda shot her cousin a look of gratitude.
And so she spent the first afternoon folding cardboard boxes into shape and then packing them with Santa Claus figures and spires for the top of Christmas trees, all neatly wrapped in crepe paper. She was so worried that she would drop something or crack it by handling it too roughly that she moved no faster than a snail. While the other packers at the long table piled up their boxes in towering stacks, her side of the table was painfully empty, which Wanda felt was at least as bad as if she had rushed through the work and broken something. But by four o’clock, when the others stopped for a coffee break, she had hit her stride. She didn’t want coffee or a slice of bread and jam, so she kept on working through the break. She even plucked up the confidence to look up from her work from time to time and glance around the workshop.
Everything was just as Marie had described it: the glassblowers’ workbenches with the gas flame burning brightly, the hiss of the lamps, the silver bath hanging in its bottles on the wall—Anna could apply the silver to the inside of the globes despite her swollen ankle—then the decorations bench with its dozens of paint pots and jars of glitter and spools of gold and silver wire. Three more hired hands—young girls from the village—sat there. When Wanda came into the workshop at midday, they had stared across at her curiously, but none of them had spoken to her yet. Along with the women at the packing table, that made five hired hands in the workshop. Wanda soon learned that her aunt had many more people on her payroll; every Tuesday and Friday Paul Marzen came by with his horse cart to fetch dozens of boxes full of silvered globes, which he took all around the village to pieceworkers, who painted them at home.
Everybody in the workshop had a specific task, and Wanda saw that the whole production line was so perfectly planned that there were never any bottlenecks or idle moments. At the end of her first day in the workshop Wanda stared in disbelief at the number of cardboard boxes that had piled up, all full. Johanna smiled as she explained that the day’s output had been relatively low, since the spires for the top of the trees were delicate work and took longer to make.