The Glass Apprentice

The workshop smelled of silica and kerosene, and if I close my eyes now I can still feel the heat on my forearms, the way the furnace pressed against my skin like a second pulse. I was fifteen the first summer I spent in Aunty Buki’s workshop, and I did not yet understand that glass could hold light the way memory holds a face — not perfectly, but with a warmth that makes the distortion bearable.

I should say at the outset that I am not entirely sure of the order in which certain things happened. It has been eleven years. Some moments I can place with confidence — the afternoon the harmattan haze turned the workshop copper, the evening my mother came to collect me in her church clothes, the morning I found the photograph. But other things have shifted. I have told this story to myself so many times that I can no longer be certain which details belong to the telling and which belong to the truth.

What I can say is that Aunty Buki was not my aunt, not in any biological sense, though I called her Aunty the way we called every older woman Aunty, and she never corrected me. She ran a small glassblowing studio on Balogun Street in Lagos, wedged between a fabric shop and a mechanic’s yard. The sign outside read BUKOLA ADESANYA — FINE GLASS in hand-painted green letters that had faded nearly to white by the time I arrived.

My mother had arranged the apprenticeship. This was her way — she arranged things. She arranged my school uniform each evening, pressed and folded on the chair beside my bed. She arranged the food on our plates in order of what should be eaten first, the vegetables always at twelve o’clock, the rice at six. She arranged my life the way she arranged the sitting room before her prayer group arrived on Thursdays: nothing out of place, everything serving a visible purpose.

“You will learn a trade,” she told me. “Something you can do with your hands. In case.” She did not say in case of what. My mother had a gift for incomplete sentences that somehow conveyed more than finished ones.

I remember the first morning clearly, or I believe I do. Aunty Buki was shorter than I expected, with broad hands and forearms roped with old burn scars. She wore a wrapper tied high under her arms and a pair of safety goggles pushed up on her forehead like a second set of eyes. She looked at me for a long time before she spoke.

“Your mother says you are good with your hands.”

“Yes, ma.”

“Your mother says many things.” She turned back to the furnace. “We will see.”

I want to be careful here, because what I am about to describe is the atmosphere of those first weeks, and atmosphere is the thing memory distorts most easily. But I believe the workshop was, for me, a kind of revelation. Not a dramatic one — not a curtain pulled back to reveal a hidden world. More like the slow adjustment of the eye when you step from bright sunlight into a dim room. Gradually, shapes emerged.

At home, my mother’s house operated on silence. We did not shout. We did not play music after eight in the evening. We did not leave dishes in the sink or shoes by the door. My mother’s rules were not cruel — I want to be clear about that. She was not a tyrant. She was a woman who believed that order was a form of love, and perhaps she was right. But the house had a quality of held breath about it, as though we were all waiting for something that never came.

The workshop was different. Aunty Buki played Fela Kuti on a portable radio so old its antenna was held on with electrical tape. She hummed while she worked. She left tools wherever she set them down and could always find them again, as though they were tethered to her by invisible threads. She ate chin chin from a plastic bag while teaching me to gather molten glass on the end of a blowpipe, and she wiped her hands on her wrapper without apology.

“Glass does not forgive hesitation,” she told me on my third day, when I had let a gather cool too long and it slumped off the pipe onto the floor, where it shattered into a shape like a small orange sun. “You must decide what you are making before the glass decides for you.”

I practised gathering for two weeks before she let me attempt a bubble. Two weeks of dipping the pipe into the crucible, turning it, feeling the weight of the molten glass shift as it wrapped around the steel. My forearms blistered, then calloused. The heat became familiar — not comfortable, but known, the way you come to know the particular ache of a chair you sit in every day.

When I finally blew my first bubble, it was lopsided and clouded with tiny fractures. Aunty Buki held it up to the window and turned it slowly. Light came through in broken lines.

“What do you see?” she asked.

“A bad bubble.”

She laughed. It was the first time I had heard her laugh, and it surprised me — a low, full sound, nothing like my mother’s careful smiles. “You see the flaws because you are looking for flaws. Look again.”

I looked. The light through the fractures made small rainbows on the wall.

“When glass breaks inside itself, it bends the light in new directions. Remember that.”

I think about that moment more than I should. At the time, I took it as a lesson about craftsmanship — about finding beauty in imperfection, the kind of thing you might read on a calendar. But now, knowing what I know, I wonder if she was telling me something else entirely. I wonder if she was already beginning to say what she would not say directly for another two months.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

The weeks settled into a rhythm. I arrived at the workshop each morning at seven, before the worst of the heat. Aunty Buki would already be there, the furnace lit, the radio murmuring. She taught me the basic forms — tumblers, vases, simple bowls — and I learned the way you learn any physical skill, through repetition and failure and the slow accumulation of muscle memory that eventually replaces thought.

My mother asked about my progress each evening at dinner. She asked in the way she asked about school — precise questions that required precise answers. “What did you make today? How many pieces? Did she say you were improving?”

I gave her the answers she wanted. I did not tell her about the music, or the chin chin, or the way Aunty Buki sometimes stopped working to tell me stories about her years studying glass in Murano, the island near Venice where the master glassblowers lived. I did not tell her because I sensed, even then, that something about the workshop would not translate into my mother’s language. It was not that my mother would disapprove. It was that her approval would somehow diminish it — would make it another thing arranged, another item pressed flat and folded into the shape of her expectations.

This is not fair to my mother, and I know that. I am doing what the young always do to the people who raised them — reducing a whole person to the qualities that constrained us. My mother was also the woman who sat beside my bed when I had malaria at age nine, pressing a damp cloth to my forehead and singing hymns so quietly I was not sure whether I was hearing her or dreaming her. She was the woman who kept a photograph of my father in her Bible, though she never spoke his name, and who once, when I asked about him, said only, “Some stories are not mine to tell, Adanna.” And looked away.

I did not press her. We did not press each other in that house. That was perhaps the most important rule, though it was never spoken aloud.

At the workshop, Aunty Buki pressed constantly. “No, no. Again. Feel the glass — is it telling you to turn? Then turn. You are fighting it. Stop fighting.” She would take the blowpipe from my hands and demonstrate, her movements so fluid they seemed boneless, the glass responding to her breath like something alive. Then she would hand it back, and I would try again, and fail, and she would sigh and say, “Tomorrow.”

But she also gave me things my mother never gave me: praise that felt unearned and therefore real. “Your hands are learning,” she said one afternoon, watching me pull a gather into a cylinder. “The glass is beginning to trust you.” She said this as casually as she might have said it was going to rain, but I carried it home like a secret, like a piece of hard candy held under the tongue.

There were other things, too. Small kindnesses that I did not recognize as kindnesses at the time. She would send me to buy suya from the man on the corner when she saw that I was tired, and when I came back the spiced meat would be too much for one person, so we would share it, sitting on overturned buckets outside the workshop door, watching the street. She asked me about school, about my friends — I had few — about what books I was reading. She told me about Venice, about the canals that smelled of salt and rot, about the old masters who would not teach a woman and the one who finally did, a man named Giancarlo who was eighty years old and nearly blind but whose hands still knew every shape glass could take.

“He said to me, ‘Bukola, glass is the only honest material. It shows you exactly what it is. It hides nothing.’” She bit into a piece of suya and chewed thoughtfully. “He was wrong, of course. Glass hides everything. That is what makes it beautiful.”

I remember the street sounds during those conversations — the okadas buzzing past, the fabric seller next door calling out prices, the mechanic’s radio competing with ours. I remember the taste of groundnut dust on the suya and the way the late-afternoon light fell between the buildings in long yellow slats. These details may be invented. They feel true, which is not the same thing.

There was a moment — I am not sure exactly when, perhaps the fourth or fifth week — when I noticed the photographs on the wall behind the grinding station. They were partially hidden by a shelf of finished pieces, and I had not looked carefully at them before. Most showed Aunty Buki at various ages: young and thin in what looked like Italy, standing beside a furnace much larger than hers; older, in a studio I did not recognize, holding up a piece of deep blue glass; and one I almost passed over, a small snapshot of two women standing in front of a church.

One of the women was Aunty Buki. The other was my mother.

They were young in the photograph — younger than I was that summer. They wore matching dresses, the kind of stiff Sunday fabric I recognized from my mother’s wardrobe, and they were holding hands. My mother was smiling in a way I had never seen her smile: open, unguarded, the smile of someone who has not yet learned to arrange her face.

I did not mention the photograph to Aunty Buki. I am not sure why. Perhaps because the discovery felt fragile, like the first bubble I had blown — something that might shatter if I looked at it too directly. Or perhaps because I already sensed, in the way children sense things long before they have language for them, that the photograph was a door I was not supposed to open.

The harmattan came early that year. By late November, the air was thick with dust from the Sahara, and the workshop took on a strange doubled heat — the furnace from within, the dry wind from without. Everything was covered in a fine orange powder. Aunty Buki wrapped a cloth around her nose and mouth when she worked, and the glass she made during those weeks had a faintly amber tint, as though the dust had gotten into the crucible itself.

It was during the harmattan that she began to teach me about colour. Until then, I had worked only with clear glass. Now she showed me how to add metallic oxides to the melt — cobalt for blue, manganese for purple, iron for green. The chemistry fascinated me: the idea that colour was not a surface quality but a structural one, embedded in the glass at the molecular level. You could not paint glass blue. You had to make it blue from the inside.

“This is why I do not trust paint,” Aunty Buki said. She had a habit of making pronouncements like this — grand, declarative statements that she clearly enjoyed. “Paint is a lie you tell to the outside of a thing. Glass colour is the truth of the thing itself.”

I laughed, and she looked at me with something like surprise, and then she laughed too. It was a good moment. I have replayed it often enough that I worry I have worn it smooth, the way you wear the face off a coin by handling it too much.

It was during a colour lesson, I think — though it may have been later — that I asked Aunty Buki how she knew my mother.

She did not stop working. She continued turning the blowpipe, her eyes on the glass. But something changed in the quality of her attention, the way a radio signal changes when you drive under a bridge.

“We grew up together,” she said. “In Nsukka.”

“My mother is from Enugu.”

“She moved to Enugu later. We were in Nsukka first. Your mother and I.” She paused. “And your father.”

This was more information about my father than I had received in fifteen years. I held very still, the way you hold still when a bird lands near you and you do not want to frighten it away.

“He was a glassblower?” I asked, because the workshop seemed like the only place where such a question could be asked.

“No.” She smiled. “He was a mathematics teacher. But he had good hands.” She lifted the blowpipe and examined the piece she was shaping — a small bowl, deep green, the colour of the underside of a leaf. “You have his hands, Adanna.”

I did not know what to do with this. I stored it away, alongside the photograph, in the place where I kept things I could not yet understand. My mother’s silence about my father had always been so complete that it had taken on the quality of architecture — a wall so solid I had stopped noticing it was there. Now Aunty Buki had opened a window in that wall, and through it came a wind I was not prepared for.

That evening, my mother asked me her usual questions at dinner. What did you make? How many pieces? I answered as I always did. But then I asked, “Mama, were you and Aunty Buki friends in Nsukka?”

My mother set down her fork. She did this slowly, with the deliberate care she brought to all her movements, and I watched her face compose itself the way glass cools — the surface hardening while something still moves beneath.

“Who told you I lived in Nsukka?”

“Aunty Buki.”

“Aunty Buki talks too much.” She picked up her fork again. “Eat your vegetables.”

I ate my vegetables. But something had shifted. The wall had a window in it now, and I could not stop looking through it, even though the view was unclear.

There is something I have not mentioned, because I am not sure where it belongs in the sequence. One Sunday — it must have been mid-November, because the harmattan had not yet arrived but you could feel it coming, that dry tightening of the air — my mother took me to Aunty Buki’s house for lunch. Not the workshop. Her house, in Surulere, a small bungalow with a garden full of bougainvillea so red it looked artificial.

I had not known they saw each other outside the workshop. I had assumed the arrangement was purely professional — my mother paying for my training, Aunty Buki providing it, the transaction clean and bounded. But here was my mother in Aunty Buki’s sitting room, accepting a glass of zobo, complimenting the curtains, and the two of them talked with the careful warmth of people who know each other well enough to be dangerous.

They spoke in Igbo when they forgot I was listening, and in English when they remembered. I caught fragments. Nne m, you worry too much. She is doing well. And my mother: I know she is doing well. That is not what worries me. And then they both looked at me, and Aunty Buki changed the subject to the price of propane.

The lunch was jollof rice and fried plantain and a pepper soup so hot it made my eyes water. Aunty Buki laughed at me and brought me bread to cool my mouth. My mother watched this with an expression I could not read — something between gratitude and pain, so finely balanced that it could have been either.

On the drive home, my mother said, “Aunty Buki cares for you very much.”

“I know, Mama.”

“More than you know,” she said. And then she turned on the radio, and we drove the rest of the way in silence.

I want to tell you about the last piece Aunty Buki taught me to make before the apprenticeship ended, because it is the piece I have carried with me all these years, and because it is the piece that, in retrospect, held everything.

It was December by then. The harmattan had eased, and the air had that rinsed quality it gets after the dust settles. Aunty Buki said she wanted to teach me a technique she had learned in Murano, a method of embedding one colour of glass inside another so that the inner colour was visible only when light passed through at a certain angle.

“It is called incalmo,” she said. “Two separate bubbles joined into one. The skill is in matching the temperature exactly, so the seam disappears. If you get it right, no one can tell where one colour ends and the other begins.”

She demonstrated. Two bubbles — one amber, one clear — opened, joined at their rims, fused with a turning motion so practiced it looked inevitable. The finished piece was a tall, slender vase that appeared colourless until you held it to the window, and then the amber bloomed inside it like a second sun trapped under ice.

“Now you,” she said.

I failed. Not once but five times across two days. The bubbles cracked at the seam, or the temperatures were wrong and one colour swallowed the other, or the join was visible as an ugly ridge circling the piece like a scar. Each failure went into the bin with a sound like small bells.

On my sixth attempt, something changed. I cannot describe it except to say that I stopped trying. My hands moved and I moved with them, or behind them, and the two bubbles met and joined in a way that felt less like a technique and more like an agreement. When I held the finished piece to the light, the amber was there inside the clear glass, glowing faintly, hidden and present at the same time.

Aunty Buki took it from me and turned it slowly. She held it up and looked through it, and the light made her face amber, and her eyes were wet.

“Adanna,” she said. And then she said something I did not understand at the time. She said, “You were always going to be able to do this.”

I thought she meant I had talent. I carried that belief for years — that she had seen something in me, some gift, and that the apprenticeship had been her way of drawing it out. It was a story that made sense, and I told it to myself in the way we tell ourselves stories about our own lives: selectively, flatteringly, with the difficult parts left soft and out of focus.

I did not learn the truth until three years later, when my mother was in hospital with the illness that would eventually take her. She was diminished by then — her body smaller, her voice reduced to a careful whisper, her arrangements finally beyond her control. The hospital room was disordered in a way that would have horrified her healthy self: cups on the wrong table, pillows bunched and asymmetrical, the curtain half-drawn.

She asked me to bring her Bible from home. I did, and when I opened it to find the psalm she wanted, the photograph fell out. Not the one from the workshop wall — a different one, older, creased and handled so often the image was ghosting away. It showed three people: my mother, Aunty Buki, and a man I did not recognize, standing in front of a building that might have been a university.

“Mama,” I said. “Who is this?”

She looked at the photograph for a long time. Then she said, “That is your father.”

I waited.

“He died before you were born. An accident on the Enugu road. He was coming to see Buki. They were —” She stopped. She rearranged the sheet across her lap. “He and Buki were married, Adanna. She was his wife. Not me.”

The room was very quiet. I could hear the monitor beside her bed, its small digital heartbeat. I could hear, from somewhere down the corridor, a television playing a Nollywood film, the actors’ voices bright and performative and impossibly far away.

“He was coming to see Buki,” my mother said again, as though repetition could soften it. “When the accident happened. She was pregnant too. She lost the baby.”

I sat with this. I sat with it the way you sit with a piece of glass that has just come out of the furnace — you cannot touch it, you can only wait for it to cool enough to hold.

“Buki and I —” My mother’s voice caught. “We did not speak for many years. And then, when you were twelve, she wrote to me. She said she wanted to know you. She said she wanted to teach you.”

“Glassblowing,” I said.

“Yes.” My mother closed her eyes. “She said she had no children. She said you were the closest thing.”

I understood then — or I began to understand, which is not the same thing — why Aunty Buki had cried when I made the incalmo vase. I understood the two colours joined so the seam disappeared. I understood why my mother had arranged the apprenticeship with such care, and why she had asked her precise questions each evening, and why she had set down her fork so slowly when I mentioned Nsukka.

I understood that the workshop had never been only about glass.

Aunty Buki died four years ago. A stroke, sudden, in the workshop. They found her with a blowpipe still in her hand, or so I was told — I was in Abuja by then, working as an architect, drawing buildings that were, in their own way, containers for light. She left me the workshop in her will, along with a box of finished pieces and a short letter that said, in its entirety: Adanna, the glass remembers what we teach it. I taught it everything I knew. Now it is yours.

I have not gone back to Balogun Street. I tell myself I will, and perhaps I will, but the truth is that I am afraid of what I will find there — not ruin or emptiness, but the furnace cold, the tools in their wrong-right places, the radio silent, and the light coming through the finished pieces on the shelf, bending in directions I can only now begin to trace.

My mother died first, two years before Buki. In her final weeks she spoke more freely than she ever had. She told me about Nsukka, about the three of them young together, about the compound where she and Buki had grown up side by side. She told me that my father had loved Buki first, and that this had been the wound she could not forgive — not the loving, but the firstness of it, the way it made her own love a kind of echo.

“I arranged everything after he died,” she said. “I arranged it so there was no room for the mess of it. I arranged you.” She looked at me, and for once her face was unarranged — open, the way it had been in that old photograph on the workshop wall. “I am sorry, Adanna. I arranged you when I should have let you grow.”

She died on a Tuesday. I remember it was raining. I remember the hospital corridor smelled of antiseptic and jollof rice from the cafeteria. I remember that I sat beside her bed for a long time after, holding her hand, which was small and still and cool, and thinking about glass — about how it looks solid but is really a liquid, how it is always moving, imperceptibly, toward a shape it has not yet reached.

I am twenty-six now, and I have told you this story as honestly as I can, though I know that honesty and accuracy are not the same thing. Memory is a kind of glass: it lets the light through, but it bends it. The things I have told you are true, but they are true the way a piece of incalmo is true — two colours joined so completely that you cannot say where one ends and the other begins.

I do not know whether Aunty Buki loved me for myself or for the ghost of the child she lost. I do not know whether my mother sent me to her as an act of generosity or of penance. I do not know whether the workshop was a gift or a confession.

What I know is this: on a December afternoon in Lagos, when I was fifteen years old, I held a piece of glass to the window and saw amber light bloom inside it like something that had been waiting, all along, to be seen. And Aunty Buki said, You were always going to be able to do this. And she was not talking about the glass. Or she was talking about the glass, and also about everything the glass contained. And I think now, eleven years later, that there is no difference.

The workshop smelled of silica and kerosene. The furnace pressed its heat against my skin. The radio played Fela, and the dust settled on the finished pieces, and the light came through them sideways, refracted, broken into colours that were truer than the light itself.

I close my eyes and I am there.