The Glassblower(5)

“Perhaps it’s . . . Father?” Ruth glanced back toward the workshop.

“Ruth!” Marie said, shuddering, and looked at Johanna with fear in her eyes.

“Everyone knows that dead bodies begin to smell when—”

“That’s enough!” Johanna cut in harshly. They had the whole night’s wake ahead of them. The last thing they needed was Ruth talking nonsense. She went to the cupboard and took out the rest of the candles. Light was good. Light would certainly help. “That’s not a dead body over there, that’s Father.”

Ruth opened her mouth but then thought better about uttering whatever she had been about to say. Nobody wanted an argument with a dead man in the house.

Johanna gradually unclenched her jaw. Her eyes had been staring ahead like a painted puppet’s, but now she looked around, and her arms relaxed as well. She hadn’t realized until then that she had had them crossed in front of her almost the entire day. She leaned back in her chair. For the first time that day, there was nothing she was expected to say, no task she had to do.

One of them was gone now.

The longer the silence lasted, the more they all missed him. The way he’d clattered his spoon on the table when he had to wait too long for his supper, or if he thought Ruth had skimped on putting sausage in the soup. The methodical way he sliced bread and carved the smoked ham.

Johanna was the first to break the silence. “Father was always such a picture of health . . .” Then she pressed her lips tightly closed again.

Ruth nodded. “He was never a spindle-shanks like Bavarian Hans or Friedmar Grau. But he wasn’t a fat fellow either, not like Wilhelm Heimer.”

“You never needed to look and see whether Father had come into the room. You always felt that he was there.” Marie was speaking Johanna’s thoughts for her. “Everyone respected him.” She smiled. “Do you remember the time he bought those two roosters?”

Johanna laughed a sad little laugh. “He bought them for me from Paul Marzen. He hoped that I would wake up more easily if there were two roosters crowing in the yard, not just one. And then Marzen came knocking at the door, drunk as a skunk, saying that he’d given Father the wrong birds, that these were his best breeding fowl, and he wanted them back.”

“All Father had to do was square his shoulders and Marzen turned tail and fled.”

“And those roosters never did turn out to be of much use.”

They laughed, and then fell quiet again.

“Who will look after us now?” Marie asked.

Johanna looked over at her. She mustn’t ask that. Not tonight. Nor tomorrow, either.

“When you were little, he always used to call you his princess, do you remember?” Marie had always been Joost’s little girl.

“A princess whose palace was inside a soap bubble. He was always promising to tell me the whole story, but he never quite got around to making one up.” Marie’s eyes brimmed with tears again.

“But he always found time to mix up the soapsuds for you to blow bubbles!” said Ruth. “Oh, those bubbles of yours.” She swept her hands through the air in the shape of a ball. “Pfft! They burst all over the place and leave little wet spots behind. Even when I was little, I couldn’t understand what you saw in them.”

“Father understood. He loved to look at the colors, just like I did.” Marie looked up. “I’m sure he’s in heaven now, and there are rainbow colors everywhere. He’ll like that. And he’ll be glad to see Mother again.”

She burst into sobs, and the others followed suit. They didn’t fight the tears.

A long while later, Ruth tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and made a face, sniffling.

“I just remembered when Friedhelm Strobel gave us that order from France with just two weeks’ notice. Five years ago, do you remember? In 1885.”

“Oh my goodness, yes!” Johanna exclaimed, clapping her hands. The candles fluttered in the gust of air. “The order for that French perfumer!” Marie looked baffled and Johanna went on. “Don’t you remember? They wanted five thousand perfume bottles. And every one had to be engraved ‘Eau de Paris.’ ”

Marie snapped her fingers. “I remember now! Father wrote it out for us. But his handwriting was so bad that we couldn’t rightly read it. By the time he checked up on us, we’d put ‘Roi de Paris’ on a thousand bottles.”

“King of Paris.” Ruth shook her head. “Anybody else would have beaten us black and blue for a mistake like that, but what did Father do? Laughed and laughed till it seemed he would never stop.” She glanced over her shoulder into the workshop. That wasn’t just a cold dead body lying back there; it was their own dear father.