The Glassblower(83)

Her only consolation after this unpleasant discovery was the thought that she hadn’t let him sneer at Marie’s baubles too. He would probably have stolen that idea as well and . . . The very idea was so dreadful that Johanna didn’t dwell upon it. Marie would have wanted to kill her; that much was certain!





PART TWO

LATE SPRING, 1892

Glass, glass,

What is glass?

A thing that is nothing

where light may pass.

It is air and not air,

it is there and nowhere.

And yet it is hard

and the dazed bird

as it flies through the land

strikes the glass and cannot understand.



—Gerhart Hauptmann





1

With tired motions, Ruth pounded and kneaded the heavy bread dough on the tabletop, over and over again. Then she listlessly formed four loaves, placed them on a wooden board sprinkled with flour, and covered them with a clean cloth. Tomorrow at the crack of dawn she would take the bread to the bakehouse and hope that one of the other women would put it in with her batch. Ruth didn’t have time to put the loaves into the great stone oven and then wait around and chat while they baked. With her job in the workshop, her chores at home, and caring for Wanda, her days were more than full. She would have given anything to have old Edeltraud’s help one day a week.

“You’ll manage the little bit of housework we have here. Just think how it would look if I had to ask Father for help,” Thomas had said, shaking his head uncomprehendingly when Ruth suggested the idea.

“But Eva never has to ask for anything!” she hissed now, not that there was anyone around to hear her.

There was still a cup of lukewarm tea left over from the pot she had made at supper. Ruth looked down into the pale green fluid with disgust. What she wouldn’t give for a cup of real coffee. She still had a few beans left—Johanna brought her a little bag from time to time—but she wanted to save them for another day, when she was in a better mood. The bitter tea was just right for today, she decided in a moment of self-mortification.

She glanced over toward the cot and then drew up one of the chairs that Thomas had dragged out from some dusty corner of Wilhelm’s attic. She would far rather have had a corner bench put in for the kitchen table. “We can sit on chairs just as well. And we’re up at Father’s house most of the time anyway,” Thomas had said when she mentioned it. When it came to spending money, he was just as stingy as his father.

It was shortly before eight o’clock in the evening and still light outside as the days were growing longer. It could be hours before Thomas came back from the Black Eagle, but Ruth nonetheless kept her ears open for any sound at the door. She didn’t want to revisit their argument from earlier that evening, and she knew that Thomas’s mood would not have improved after a few beers.

Once again, he had worked himself up into a rage at the smallest provocation. Wanda was almost four months old, and she had grown so big that she had been kicking her feet up against the end of the cradle for weeks, so Ruth had ordered a little cot for her from Zurr the carpenter—she didn’t want her child to grow up bowlegged after all. Zurr had brought it round that evening and as bad luck would have it, Thomas had been at the door to take delivery. Zurr had hardly said good-bye before Thomas had let fly at her, accusing her of all kinds of things—spendthrift was the very least of his insults. He had hurled one recrimination at her after another. And that wasn’t all.

Why hadn’t she told him before that she had ordered the bed, Ruth chided herself. He didn’t like it when she went behind his back, and he always wanted to be kept informed. Heaven forbid that she not let him know what she was doing and why. But damn it all. She wasn’t his prisoner! Did a married woman have no rights at all?

She wanted to go to bed. Her arms ached from carrying heavy cardboard boxes full of glassware back and forth all day, and her head pounded with a dull leaden pain. But instead she reached for her knitting basket. For a moment she hesitated over the three pieces she had already started, wondering which to carry on with, but then she settled on a little jacket. By the time she finished, Wanda would probably have long outgrown it.

“Moaning minnie!” she chided herself. Then she rummaged around in the basket for the most colorful piece of wool she could find. Perhaps there would be enough of the yellow to put two narrow stripes up the sleeves?

Her knitting needles clicked in an unsteady rhythm—as unsteady as her thoughts, which were chasing around in her head now that there was finally time after a long and strenuous day of work. Struggling helplessly to clear her mind, she looked around the apartment that was now her home. They had moved into these rooms above the Heimer warehouse straight after the wedding. It seemed a hundred years ago now.