The American Lady(88)

Anna groaned. “Please don’t ask me to do it. I want to see what I can do with that new bird-shaped mold. Besides, you know that I don’t like calling on old Fritz. His hunchback gives me the shivers, and every time I go I’m afraid I’ll find him lying stone dead among all the boxes!”

The others laughed.

“He’s as old as the hills, our village box-maker,” Johannes explained when Wanda looked at him inquiringly. “It’s true, he won’t last much longer . . . One of these days we’ll have to carry him out of his workshop in one of his own crates!”

There was more laughter.

“That’s quite enough!” Johanna scolded them. “What will your cousin think of you when you make such cruel jokes?”

Wanda cleared her throat. “If you tell me the way, I can go and fetch the labels myself. A bit of fresh air would do me good, and besides, it’s time I saw a little more of Lauscha.”

“That would be a fine thing, if the first place you saw in Lauscha was Fritz’s dusty old warehouse! That would hardly give you the right impression of the place,” Johanna said, dismissing her offer with a wave.

The others traded glances of amusement.

“I’d come with you, but we have that order from England, which can’t wait, and . . . Peter can’t leave the workshop either.” Johanna tapped her pencil against the desk absentmindedly, as she always did when she was thinking something over. “No, we’ll do it this way . . .”

Wanda waited patiently to see what plan her aunt would come up with. She was a little annoyed with herself for being so meek—she would never have put up with her parents deciding something like this for her.

Johanna looked affectionately at Wanda. “You won’t go on your own, in any case. I want you to see the best that Lauscha has to offer, so that you know it’s at least as lovely as Marie has described it to you. You’ve had to wait so long after all . . .”

“Do you mean eighteen years, or do you mean the weeks when she was ill?” Peter asked with a grin.

“Both!” Johanna laughed. “Now, listen to this: Paul Marzen can pick up the box of labels from Fritz when he does the rounds of the pieceworkers; that way none of us have to leave the house. Anna needs the time to work with the mold as she said, and she shouldn’t walk far anyway. But if we all work a little longer this evening, Johannes can give Wanda a tour of Lauscha first thing tomorrow morning.”





9

“Oh yes, and over there used to be the main foundry. My father was a master glassmaker there, but they shut the place nine years ago.”

Johannes’s breath hung in the air in the form of a white cloud while he spoke.

Wanda looked at the abandoned building and felt a twinge of sorrow. The wooden walls were black with soot, and all that was left of the windows were a few jagged glass shards, gnawing at the air. Somebody had torn the boards out along one side, leaving a gaping hole. Wanda had no desire to see what it was like inside.

When Marie had told her stories, the village foundry had been much more than just the place where the glass rods were made. It had been the center of village life, and the little square in front of the foundry was where the most important festivals happened, where everybody met at the end of the day’s work before they went off to a tavern for a beer.

But that was all in the past.

Wanda pointed to the slender chimney that towered over all the buildings around them.

“Like a lonely giant . . . it’s a sad sight.”

Johannes hopped from foot to foot. “But when you remember that the other foundries shut their doors decades ago—there was Steeplejack here in the village, and a foundry up in Obermühle as well—you have to admit that our dear old foundry here did well to last as long as it did. With the modern glass factories that exist nowadays, an old-fashioned place like this was never going to be able to keep up. Well, that’s the way of the world and nobody can hold back progress.”

“The way of the world . . . you sound like an old man,” Wanda teased him.

“You should hear what the old men say! My father and the other master glassmakers sit around their favorite table in the tavern and talk about how things are getting worse! ‘It was all so much better in the old days,’” Johannes said, imitating his father’s voice.

On their walk through Lauscha, they had already passed at least five houses where Johannes told her that the family that lived there had no work and nowhere to turn for its next meal. Half of the villagers seemed to be on their last legs. And here was this tumbledown wreck, casting its shadow over the main square in the village.