The Glassblower(93)
At some point it was over. Johanna’s body was slick with Strobel’s sweat. He shoved her to the floor, and she lay there, curled up, her eyes closed. Her mind was empty, her body a shell riddled with holes, dead. Her clothes were torn rags that no longer clothed her nakedness. And she still did not dare believe that it was really over. When he kicked her, it wasn’t entirely unexpected.
“Get up and do as you’re told!”
As the voice came nearer, Johanna tried to shrink even smaller.
“And don’t you dare breathe a word about this to a soul. Remember: you have only yourself to blame for what happened here.”
Johanna was still in her room at the back of the house when Strobel came to his senses.
“What have I done?” he whispered hoarsely, looking at the blood on the palms of his hands, on the open fly of his pants. “Whatever have I done?” His heart was hammering wildly. How could he, the connoisseur, lose control like this? How could he run wild like a raging bull, when he was such a sensitive soul?
A punishment.
Johanna.
His shirt, soaked in blood.
His shop, closed all day.
Were there customers waiting at the door?
Johanna! Should he go to her?
Apologize?
His head was buzzing with pointless thoughts.
“Only a fool would poach in his own forest,” he heard a voice say in disgust from a long way off. That well-known voice, humiliating him. Strobel put his hands over his ears.
“I didn’t mean to.”
Had he said that aloud? He bit at the knuckle of his index finger till the skin split and the blood began to flow.
Money! He would offer Johanna money. A great deal of money! Enough to make her keep quiet and . . .
“Is it not enough that your sins dishonor your Maker?”
And now Strobel saw his father’s face, the fine patrician features twisted in disgust at his offspring. Next to him was the hunched figure of his cousin Clara. The old hatred boiled up in him again. Clara, that Polish whore! A poor relation who had sought refuge with his family and had been taken in. In thanks she had brought disaster down on his head. And how she had enjoyed his downfall! With her brooding, despondent manner, she could hardly have made her point more clearly if she had hung a placard around her neck with the words “Fallen Woman.” And all this after she had spent months provoking him, making eyes at him all over the house.
“How could you bring your brutish habits into this house and dishonor your ancestors so?”
Until that moment he had never seen his father tremble with rage.
Strobel overturned the table and flung it to the floor. Then a chair. Another. Damn it, she had wanted it to happen! Just like Johanna.
“I condemn you for all eternity.”
Strobel’s stomach twisted into a hard knot.
No, no more damnation.
He had been young then, and easily browbeaten by his father. That was the only reason he could think of for why he had allowed himself to be chased away like a dog. Today nobody would be able to chase him away; that was certain!
He heard a door slam shut out in the hall. When he looked out the window he could not help but admire how Johanna held her head high as she walked away. She had two large bags and a suitcase with her.
She’s going!
Leaving me, and my shop!
He had to do something, he had to. It wasn’t so bad after all, a mere misdemeanor. Nothing more than that. A lapse. Insignificant.
He ran to the door, hurled it open, and . . .
She was gone.
“I will see to it with everything in my power that not a door in Berlin will be open to you!”
A smile crept back over Strobel’s face. A sardonic smile.
His father had been wrong! Not all doors had remained closed to him. Quite the opposite.
Disgusted, he looked at the chaos he had made in the kitchen. Then he laughed dismissively.
A loss of self-control, no more than that. A momentary lapse, though if he wasted his time standing around here listening to the voices of the past it might still have the potential to ruin his reputation a second time.
He could not allow that to happen.
He bent down shakily and picked up the chairs. He shoved the table back into the middle of the room. Fetched a cloth and wiped down the sticky tabletop.
He had to think.
Find a solution.
He would not be condemned again.
Strobel’s shop stayed closed the rest of the day.
It was five o’clock in the afternoon when he finally left the house. Carefully dressed, with not a trace of Johanna’s blood left on him, his back bowed as though under a heavy burden, he walked through the streets with a worried look on his face. He looked even more worried as he went into the Golden Ox, his hostelry of choice whenever he wanted to eat out. Instead of taking a table by the window as he usually did, he chose the table where Sonneberg’s businessmen gathered, and he ordered a schnapps. Everything about his behavior was utterly uncharacteristic: coming to the tavern in broad daylight, choosing a different table, ordering schnapps when he usually drank wine. It didn’t take long for the first of his colleagues to sit down and ask whether anything was the matter.