The Glassblower(8)

By the time she came back to the kitchen, Johanna and Marie were already sitting at the table. One of them had gotten bread from the pantry, along with a pat of butter and the honey jar. They sat there chewing their bread in silence. None of them tasted the sweetness of honey in their mouths for they each had the same bitter question on the tip of their tongue: “What shall we do now?”



It went on raining for the next few days, and inside the house it was like Sleeping Beauty’s castle once more. Each sister crept into her own quiet corner, idling the days away and hoping that it would be bedtime soon. Peter looked in from time to time, but he never stayed long. Unlike the girls, he had work to do. And though he was ashamed to admit it to himself, every time he visited the Steinmanns, he was happy to leave again and escape the gloom in that house.



Another meal had passed in silence. Johanna suddenly looked up and cleared her throat. “I think it’s best if we go and clear away Father’s things now.”

Ruth frowned. “I don’t know . . . shouldn’t we wait a little while yet?”

“I suppose it makes no difference if we do it now or in a . . .” Johanna began, her eyes darting from one to the other, as though hoping that one of them would talk her out of the idea.

Ruth realized that Johanna no more wanted to tackle such a dreary job than she did. But it would be hard no matter when they did it. Quite apart from that, she didn’t know how long she could bear this dreadful silence in the house. Better a dreary job than nothing at all to do.

“You’re right; it’s time to tidy up a little.”



Ruth and Johanna were upstairs folding shirts and jackets, making neat bundles that they wrapped in linen, but downstairs the neighbors continued to come knocking. Even a week after Joost’s death, they still came by with food. One woman had just brought them a pot of soup, peering over Marie’s shoulder as she handed it over. How were the orphaned girls getting along? Three young women, on their own . . . that was a rarity in the village. Marie quickly realized that the old busybody would have liked to come in and look around, but she shut the door as soon as she thanked the visitor for the gift.

As Marie looked for somewhere to put the soup down, the lid of the pot slipped a little. A sharp, sour smell assailed her nose. Marie shuddered. Perhaps the soup was already spoiled? She wondered for a moment whether she should just tip it out behind the house, but then decided to put it aside for the time being. Looking for somewhere to put it down, she carried the pot through the kitchen and into the workshop, where she set it on one of the empty workbenches.

She was just about to go out again when she stopped in her tracks.

How quiet it was here!

Marie drew up a stool and sat down.

No ghosts. But it was as though the silence were haunted all the same. Day after day, the flame singing in the lamp had been the sound of their lives. “If you want the flame to sing, you have to blow hard, give it a lot of air,” Father always said. Marie felt her throat tighten. She ran her fingers lovingly over the old oil lamp where it stood abandoned next to the new gas pipe. The flame would never sing here again.

She heard a sound upstairs. Tidy up, Ruth had said—but they were talking about Father’s life!

When she had asked what she could do while the two of them worked up there, her sisters looked at one another in panic. What could they do? Ever since Father had died, the question had been everywhere in the house, unspoken but so loud that Marie felt almost deafened by it. Although she didn’t have any idea either what they should do next, she felt hurt that Ruth and Johanna didn’t even want to include her in their discussions. Just because she was the youngest, they never took her seriously. Father had treated her as a child, and now Ruth and Johanna were doing the same. But there was nothing she could do about it. She stood up with a sigh and went back to the kitchen.



Around noon, Widow Grün came calling with an apple cake. The scent of cinnamon and aniseed wafted up the stairs and drove out the smell of their father’s old clothes. While other neighbors had brought pot after pot of casserole—which the sisters ate without enthusiasm—the fresh-baked cake brought back their appetite.

“We have to thank Widow Grün again for all she’s done for us,” Johanna declared as she sliced it.

“We really must,” Ruth agreed. “The way she helped me wash Father as we laid him out—not everyone would have done that.”

“It just doesn’t seem like her to make herself so useful. She generally likes to mind her own business . . .”

“It is odd, isn’t it . . . She only lives two doors down, but we hardly ever see her,” Marie chimed in.