Only then did Marie allow herself to draw a deep breath.
So far, so good.
She did the same thing to another dozen rods. Now everything was ready.
“You can do it, Marie Steinmann,” she told herself in a whisper. She took one of the shortened rods from the pail and held it to the flame until the middle was heated through. Once it was glowing red, she took the rod from the flame and put the open end to her mouth. It felt cool, even though immensely high temperatures were at work on the glass just a hand span away from her lips. She blew into it.
Dear God, please let this work, she prayed as a bubble appeared in the glass before her eyes. A large, transparent bubble.
Marie kept blowing.
A little more.
The pounding at her temples intensified.
And a little more.
That was it. She had to stop, or the bubble would burst.
There was now a perfectly round ball where the tail had been. Marie gazed at it, hardly believing what she saw. She had managed it. She was so surprised that she forgot to work the bellows for a moment.
The flame promptly went out.
The next few weeks were the most exciting in Marie’s life—largely because nobody else knew what happened every night at Joost’s old bench.
Every evening she learned more about how to work with the lamp, how to calibrate the gas pipe and the air hose, and how to blow the glass. After creating ten almost perfectly round globes, she began to experiment with shapes. One time she stretched the bubble as she blew so that the result was egg shaped; another time she blew a shape like a pear. She was always careful not to let the glass walls become too thick or too thin or poorly proportioned. However, when she tried blowing a shape like a pinecone, she found the end result far too long and thin. Though she had to laugh at her creation, which looked not the least bit like a pinecone but rather like a long thin sausage, she was unhappy at the thought that she had wasted half a rod.
Marie turned the thing around and around. If she used a little imagination, it looked rather like one of the icicles hanging from the eaves outside, but it wasn’t a pretty sight. She put it aside.
From then on, she only blew globes and eggs. She hid all of them in the wardrobe in Joost’s old bedroom, where neither Ruth nor Johanna would happen across them.
A seasoned glassblower like Thomas Heimer could blow up to ten dozen of such a simple shape in a single day, but Marie never managed more than a dozen in one night. Her flame went out more than once, and she had to work hard to coax it back to life. Once she cut herself and had to look all over the house for a bit of clean cloth to wrap around the ball of her thumb. Another time she thought she heard Ruth coming and hastily put everything away, but it was only the wind at the door.
Marie had decided to finish four dozen globes by Christmas. It was December 18 by the time they were all blown, which didn’t leave her much time for the rest of what she wanted to do.
She took the knife that she had found in Joost’s tool kit and with trembling hands began to shear off the stems of glass as close to the globes as she could. Then she took a pair of pliers and a bale of wire that she had bought in the village store over the weekend, and cut lengths as long as her hand. She wound them around what was left of the stem at the base of the globes until each one had a loop. She held up a globe at arm’s length and examined it. Not bad. These would hang nicely on a tree.
Finally the moment she longed for had come—it was time to paint the globes.
Marie eagerly took the bottle of white enamel paint out of the drawer, then rooted around until she found the black paint as well. Black and white was all they had needed for writing the words on pharmacy jars, and they would be enough for what Marie had in mind. She gave both bottles a vigorous shake and then dipped her brush into the white paint. She began to paint one of the globes with clear, decisive strokes and only stopped when the whole globe was covered with frost crystals—large and small, some simple and others elaborately curled like the ones she had seen on the windowpane.
Shivering with anticipation Marie picked up the next bauble, which was pear-shaped. She painted the bottom half almost completely white and then dabbed tiny white dots all over the top half. A wintry landscape took shape before her eyes. When she had finished with the snowflakes, she dipped her brush into the black jar and painted the outlines of houses and rooftops.
Marie sighed with pleasure as she put the finished decorations aside. Everything looked exactly as she had imagined; the contrast between light and dark, so typical for winter, went beautifully with the cloudy glass globes. She thought regretfully of how lovely the painted designs would look against a silver background. But she couldn’t just walk into Heimer’s workshop and take over his silver bottle for her own globes.