Glassworks (Grown Old)

   “Last time, too, it was hard to find, but, heh heh, I think it’s just around the next hill. I remember a willage around here where I once stopped to ask directions—”
   “Should we probably stop now?” 

   “No, no, heh heh heh, it’s just around the next hill, I’m sure. But after I stopped, a little hart—a fawn, just—came dashing around the corner. A couple of kids were tying to chase it away but only managed to scare it into the main road through the willage, and all the gates of the fences were closed—” 

   “Yes, I’ve noticed the fences everywhere, in front of every house, without exception.” 

   “—heh heh, yes, and jumping up against one in particular like it lived there and was locked out. It was something to see. And some men in the town surrounded the poor animal—yes, we’re on the right road, now, good; just some minutes more…. It’s repaved, I see, and some houses look new, but you can’t rightly change the hills.” 

   “What happened to the deer?” 

   “Oh, yes, heh heh. Well, no one could grab it at the first closed gate, and it ran to another and another; my duty, I supposed, was to drive ahead (even it was against the way I was headed) and make sure no car speeding into the willage would hit the hart—it’s acceptable to say ‘hart’, yes?—unaware. And then one man looking like so—” 

   “barrel-chested?” 

   “—yes, yes, like a barrel, heh heh heh, grabbed the hart with his big hands and another thinner fellow had to brace him from falling down. The little hart was full of struggle and thrashing, can we say?” 

   “They can be aggressive in America if backed into a corner. People forget that their bark and their bite even exist.” 

   “He was barking, yes, yelping I suppose for a mother nowhere near. And bleeding at the mouth, probably because of the gates he was crashing into. So the big man—ah, we’re here! Marvelous. You can turn into that gravel drive.” 

   “The big man what?” 

   “Heh heh, the big man said he’d walk it to the side of the willage and release, with the thin fellow still propping him up and I don’t think they would have managed, but fortunately a green lorry came by and the three of them hopped into the back and away to the forest. Yes. Somewhere in there I hope he’s had a happy life, little grandchildren harts of his own, heh heh heh. Yes, that’s fine. So! We can begin our visit.” 

   The groomed parking lot spread like a bay between a citadel of a building and its conveyor-like wing, single and curving back toward the road so that distribution trucks wouldn’t rut the gravel. From their rental car five adults unfolded and stretched for the immanent tour. “Just a moment, please,” the silver-haired man advised and went into the visitors’ office. The air was light and warm, inviting a walk through the color-coded paths through the woods. Instead, they’d enter the furnacy environs of an ageless foundry, a roundabout way to personalize the purchase of blown glass. 

   “Now the potash that comes from this region is very fine,” the commentary began, “the product can be brittle but the expert blower knows the balance of what to keep, what to discard.” As if to demonstrate, a portly man mired in sweat inspected the tip of his two-meter pole to determine the goblet-in-the-making had no future and thus lanced it back into the oven. A couple of jabs to stoke new stuff, and “Jezhesh Maria!”—a fresh molten globule spun just an armlength from the quintet who had, to that point, assumed they were a safe distance from the work zone. “You might want to step back, mmm.” 

   “Speaking of balance, I see an extra art in perching their mugs of beer on their tool trays!” 

   “Well, it gets pretty hot—Ah! Look over here (dobry den)—see how he rounds out the stem!” A more athletic man in a white tank top nodded politely without breaking his concentration. Indeed the rotating pole served as its own lathe while a spatula stroked the glow and carved a tiny trough for the snap to come, a second-nature swig of beer before his reach for a spanner, a click on the pole and tcink: a clean break, stem from stem, to the discerning eyeball of the artisan to meet his approval or, in this case, rejection. With some disinterest he tossed the flawed piece into a metal box on the floor that hardly contained all the shatter and shards. 

   “OSHA would have a field day shutting this place down.” 

   “Yeah, but they’re an ocean away! Besides, the evidence appears rather circumstantial…” 

   “Heh heh heh… What is it, OSHA?” 

   Each of the eight furnace stations had its own chimney, but heat rose uniformly in translucent undulation to the octagon of windows some twenty meters up to—what would appear from the outside—a widow’s walk. Pigeons flew across the lower expanse of the room to this peaked space, battering the closed windows with their wings before squeezing through the open wedges or perching upon the adjustment levers. The tour moved on to the molding and finishing rooms, a path courteously swept clean of broken fragments. 

   The silver-haired man shared an animated ”nazdar” to a wheezing worker his age and clued the group in: “he is making crystal here for forty years. Oh, it’s so fine!” he proclaimed of the mold his friend unhinged. 

   “I thought the other room was crystal—thin and fragile...” 

   “No, no, that’s blown glass and crystal is heavier, has a metallic base—cobalt is what they use here, and—“ clarifying with the worker who wanted to interject a point, “this very glassworks is one of the few places that does both. Everything handmade.” 

   The rest of the visit was in choosing what to have stylized: brass to rim the steins, painted monograms, dimples and décor. The one who brought up OSHA asked the guide where the restrooms were and, to the embarrassment of both, there weren’t any that he knew of. “We’ll stop for lunch in the town right after this, though.” 

   “Well, okay. I guess I can wait.” But he really couldn’t, through all the hemming and hawing from the others about what glass would suit a given cabinet or purpose. 

   He thought it best to abscond, not back through the main furnace hall but onward, forging his own tour (in a sense), past the loading dock where there was no trailer now to plug the open space. After jumping from the platform, half his height, he reddened at the sight of the wheezing man, smoking near little stairway that would have provided the better exit. “Bathroom?” the American asked to the older man’s unassuming glance; a shrug and grin was all he could offer. But figuring out from the foreigner’s grimace and soccerwall stance, he gestured to the woods behind the building—a veritable domain for any such creature in need. 

   “Thanks,” he jogged by and, honoring the man his smoking space, timed in strides the extra building length. He turned the corner and let loose, exclaiming an “ahhh” before his stream hit the ground. 

   Not ten strides further was a different chorus of guttural relief: the receptionist (who hadn’t really received their group) was koala-wrapped around the lathe expert, his white tank top serving as her reins. His shorts and her skirt were looped knowingly on a peg near another exit door, as if positioned there for no other purpose, coupling in their own right. Both had their shoes on as the pisser could clearly see the nettles that would have no sympathy for exposed flesh. “Gosh, I’m sorry, I…uh—” and as much as turning away seemed the right reaction, the amorous pair kept their rhythm in the precious fleeting minutes of this coffee break. The American’s eyes fought hard from ‘going there’ and surveyed the nettles, planning his retreat while urinating still (how could he stop?) and, as a result of all distractions, he forgot to keep clear and clean his khaki trousers. The girl must have noticed, because he heard giggles as he staggered back around the corner. 

   There wasn’t enough breeze or sunshine behind the building to hope his miscues would evaporate, and though the old smoker had left the exit door open to facilitate his re-entry to the factory, the tourist walked past that door and the platform dock to the bright middle of the parking lot and sprawled face-up upon the rental car hood. Indeed it would be odd to have abandoned the group in such fashion, but if he could just be dry…. 

   Maybe he was, actually, by the time the others came out. “We looked all over for you!” said the silver-haired man; at least one of the others reinforced the concern with a stay-with-the-program glare, while the others scrutinized his strange recline, if not his trousers. “So, we’re all here now, yes? That’s fine. And hungry I suppose? The canteen (can we say?) is in this same willage, just five minutes away. Oh, and you needed a W.C.—we make it in four minutes in that case, heh heh heh!” 

   “Well,…” he figured wash his hands there, anyway. 

   As they ordered and asked the bartender to inaugurate their tailor-made beer mugs, the silver-haired host narrated a bit more about this part of the country. “I think here in this willage would be a good place to live and probably to die—at a ripe old age, of course. I myself was too young to be conscripted by the Nazi army when they occupied this land, but friends of mine who were a little older took refuge for many crucial months in a forest like this—ours was sixty kilometers to the west, but quite like what you see here…. No, they never caught up with our group, heh heh heh—we had our code language, our own way to get in and out without looking unusual. It was different when the war ended, of course. Less lethal, but also less clear who was the enemy. It always seemed to me that communism didn’t reach little places like this much—oh, the whole population had to play the silly game, but in this very stream, for instance, people fished for their own little living, and the glassworks kept operating like it has now for three hundred years. You asked about the forest trails and whether anybody was followed by some secret police; maybe if there were some suspicion, that was possible, but not this far from the city, or this far from the border. We’re in the center of the country, heh heh—it was a longer country back then, but still—we’re in the middle of nowhere. Paths in the middle of nowhere don’t go anywhere of note. And people here like it that way, I think.” 

   As if on cue, half a dozen employees of the glassworks clambered in, including the tank top and the skirt, not looking any more an intimate pair than the rest of them. “Ah, it is fine, heh heh heh, nazdar!”, the host called in their direction.
   The American absconder trembled as he felt more exposed than the hour before. “Dobro chut,” the receptionist said in a hint of a giggle. 

   “Good appetite,” translated the host, raising the local glass.