The Glassblower(37)

Though it was only two o’clock in the afternoon, it was so gloomy that she had to turn the light on. The dark heavy furniture made the room even dimmer. Ruth put down Edeltraud’s present. If her voice ever came to count for something in the Heimer family home, the first thing she would do would be to put this room in order. Striped wallpaper would look good in here. And new curtains. Maybe she’d even be allowed to choose some new furniture. Once she was Mrs. Heimer, she would get to work making it a room they could be proud of. After all, not many houses in the village even had a front parlor like this.

Maybe she wouldn’t even live here, though, but in the empty rooms above the warehouse instead? Just a few days before, Thomas had said in passing that the whole house belonged to his father. Perhaps he’d mentioned it for a reason?

Ruth could hardly wait for that time to come.



The only one who wasn’t thinking about the coming holiday was Marie. That was because every day was like Christmas for her at the moment. Since she had gathered up the courage to show Heimer her design for the basket bowl, she had been given the go-ahead to paint that one and three more new designs. To suit the season, one of her suggestions was a silver goblet with a pattern of frost and snow. She also found inspiration in the tinsel wire that she had disliked so much at first; if she wound it around the glasses in a thin web rather than by the fistful, the result was enchanting. Marie had endless variations of glass and colors and ornamental detail to work with.

By now she didn’t even have to wait for the right moment to go to Heimer with one of her designs; he had fallen into the habit of coming over to Marie’s workbench at least once a day to watch her paint. “Well now, what kind of egg is my girl artist brooding on today?” he would ask. The joke soon grew old, but he expected her to laugh at it each time. If she did, then when Marie suggested some little refinement or showed him one of her new designs, he never said much about it. In this, he was like her father, whose motto had always been that silence was praise enough. Marie cared little for flowery praise—all she wanted was for Wilhelm Heimer to let her carry on with her work.

“As long as you keep up with the orders we have, I don’t mind if you try something new from time to time,” he had assured her, patting her shoulder. Eva had watched jealously and then not said a word to her for the rest of the day, which Marie found very welcome indeed.

There were words of praise for Marie all the same—from an unexpected source. Heimer’s wholesaler had liked the basket bowl so much that the very day he received it, he offered it to every customer who came in. That evening, when Heimer’s hired woman had come back to the village with an order for three hundred pieces, Wilhelm’s eyes had almost popped out of his head. Over the following week, Thomas and his brothers had to take turns sitting at the lamp for an extra hour in the evenings to make enough bowls to fulfill the order. Marie realized that what she had painted for her own amusement, on a whim, would now brighten the day for hundreds of people.

From that moment on she could not shake the thought that her artistic talent might be more than just a pleasant way to pass the time.





18

Two days before Christmas, Friedhelm Strobel could no longer bear to be trapped in the narrow confines of his shop with the shelves all the way up to the ceiling. He felt like a wild animal, torn from its natural habitat and wasting its life in captivity. What am I doing here? he asked himself with a sudden rage that startled him. What on earth am I doing in this provincial backwater?

The catalyst for this anger was the letter that the postman had brought that morning. Strobel stared at the unassuming gray envelope, seething with hatred. He could smell the scent of the perfumed writing paper through it. The words themselves might have left him cold, but that scent! Oh, how well he knew that scent. For as long as he lived, it would always bring back the same bittersweet memories. Greedily, reluctantly, he breathed in the aroma of old times. He could not banish the images conjured in his mind. He heard himself sob. Why did they have to get in touch now? After all these years?

The old unease seized hold of him again. Pacing restlessly up and down, he wondered what the arrival of this letter might mean for him. What it could mean. Was there any way back?

He gnawed at his lips until they began to bleed once more.

He had tried so hard to leave the past behind him, and for a few years, he had even succeeded. He had been so relieved to escape unscathed that leaving B., despite all its temptations, had been easy. Of course he had known right from the start that the forests of Thuringia had few suitable opportunities for a man of his caliber. At the time, however, he had accepted that. Wanting to make a clean break with everything, he had made no move to keep in touch with . . . old acquaintances.