The Hare with Amber Eyes (14 page)

I feel confident that there will be less to puzzle over in Emmy von Ephrussi’s married life in Vienna. This is city life with a very different kind of family and with its own unshakeable rhythm, just ten minutes’ walk away from her childhood home in the other Palais.

The new rhythm started soon after the return from honeymoon, when Emmy discovered she was pregnant. Elisabeth, my grandmother, was born nine months after the wedding. Viktor’s mother Émilie – in my portrait, suave and implacable in her pearls – died in Vichy soon after, at the age of sixty-four. She was buried in Vichy, rather than returning to Ignace’s great mausoleum, and I wonder if she planned this final separation.

After Elisabeth comes Gisela, born three years later, and Ignace – young Iggie – is the third. They are carefully named Viennese children from careful Jewish parents. Elisabeth is named after the late adored Empress, Gisela after Archduchess Gisela, the Emperor’s daughter. Iggie is the son and that is straightforward. Ignace Léon is named after his late grandfather and after his rich, childless, duel-list Parisian uncle, and after his late great-uncle Léon. The Parisians have only had daughters. Thank God there is a son for the Ephrussi at last. And that the Palais is big enough to have nurseries and schoolrooms out of earshot.

The Palais has its diurnal pace, quickening and slackening for the servants. There is lots of carrying up and down the corridors. Endless carrying of hot water to the dressing-room, coals to the study, breakfast to the morning-room, the morning newspaper to the study, covered dishes, laundry, telegrams, post three times a day, messages, candlesticks for dinner, the evening newspaper delivered to Viktor’s dressing-room.

There is a pattern too for Anna, Emmy’s lady’s maid. It starts when she brings the silver can of warm water at half-past seven and the tray of English tea to Emmy’s bedroom. It only ends late at night when she has brushed Emmy’s hair and fetched her a glass of water and a plate of charcoal biscuits.

In the courtyard of the Palais a fiacre stands attendant all day with a coachman in livery. There are two black carriage horses, Rinalda and Arabella. A second carriage waits to take the children to the Prater or Schönbrunn. The coachmen wait. The porter, Alois, stands by the huge doors to the Ringstrasse ready to open the gates.

Vienna means dinner parties. There are endless discussions of placement. Every afternoon the butler and an assistant footman lay the table with a tape measure. There are discussions of whether it is safe to get ducks from Paris, if they come crated the day before on the Orient Express. There are florists, a dinner with a row of small orange trees in pots bearing hollowed-out oranges filled with parfait. The children are allowed to watch through a peephole as all the guests arrive.

There are afternoons at home receiving guests, with a tea table on which a silver samovar steams on a large silver tray: teapot, cream jug and sugar basin to hand, and trays of open sandwiches and iced cakes from Demel, the palace of confectionery in Kohlmarkt near the Hofburg. Ladies leave their furs in the hall, and the officers their képis and swords, and gentlemen carry their top hats and their gloves and place them on the floor next to their chairs.

There is a pattern to the year too.

January is a chance to get away from wintry Vienna. Nice or Monte Carlo with Viktor. The children are left behind. They visit Viktor’s uncle Maurice and aunt Béatrice Ephrussi in the new pink Villa Île-de-France in Cap Ferrat – now the Villa Ephrussi-Rothschild. Admire the collections of French pictures, French Empire furniture, French porcelain. Admire the improvements in the gardens, where parts of the hillside are being removed and a canal is being dug in imitation of the Alhambra. The twenty gardeners all wear white.

April is Paris with Viktor. The children are left behind. They stay chez Fanny in the Hôtel Ephrussi in the place d’Iéna, and there is lots of shopping for Emmy and days at the offices of Ephrussi et Cie for Viktor. Paris is not the same.

Charles Ephrussi, beloved owner of the
Gazette,
Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur, supporter of artists, friend of poets, collector of the netsuke, Viktor’s favourite cousin, has died on 30th September 1905 at the age of fifty-five.

The notice in the newspapers begs those who have not received an invitation not to come to the funeral. The pall-bearers – his brothers, Théodore Reinach, Marquis de Cheveniers – were in tears. There have been numerous obituaries, talking of his ‘
délicatesse naturelle
’ and his uprightness and sense of propriety. The
Gazette
has published a memorial obituary surrounded by a black border:

It was with stupor and profound sorrow that all those who knew him learnt – at the end of last September – of the sudden illness and then the death of the lovable and good man, of the highest of intelligence that was Charles Ephrussi. In Parisian society, particularly in the world of arts and letters, he had developed numerous friendships with people who succumbed quite naturally to the charm and certainty of his manner, the elevation of his spirit and the gentleness of his heart. Anybody who knocked at his door witnessed his good charming grace, welcoming young artists as he did their elders, he had befriended – we can affirm it without a single demur – all those who had approached him.

Proust writes his condolences to the obituarist. On reading this obituary in the
Gazette
, ‘those who did not know M. Ephrussi will come to love him, and those who did know him will be full of recollections’. Charles has left Emmy a golden necklace in his will. He has left a pearl collar to Louise, and his estate to his niece Fanny Reinach, who is married to the Hellenist scholar.

And, shockingly, Charles’s brother Ignace Ephrussi,
mondain
, dueller,
amateur de la femme
, has also died of a poor heart at the age of sixty. He is remembered as a perfect rider, to be seen on his grey early in the morning in the Bois de Boulogne saddled
à la russe
. Generous and punctilious, he has left the three young Ephrussi children, Elisabeth, Gisela and Iggie, 30,000 francs each in his will and he has even left Emmy’s younger sisters, Gerty and Eva, something too. The brothers have been buried together in Montmartre in the family tomb alongside their long-dead parents and their beloved sister.

Soon after visiting Paris – much emptier without the animation of Charles and Ignace – comes the summer. This starts in July with the Gutmanns, Jewish financiers and philanthropists, Viktor and Emmy’s closest friends. They have five children, so Elisabeth, Gisela and Iggie are invited for several weeks to their country house, Schloss Jaidhof, fifty miles from Vienna. Viktor stays put in Vienna.

August is Switzerland at the Chalet Ephrussi with the Parisian cousins Jules and Fanny. Take the children and Viktor. Do very little. Try to keep the children quiet. Hear about Paris. Take the boat out onto Lake Lucerne from the boathouse where the Russian imperial flag flies, with one of the footmen to do the rowing. Go to the Concours Hippique in Lucerne with Jules in the motor-car to see the show-jumping, with ices at Hugeni afterwards.

September and October are at Kövecses with the children and parents, Pips and lots of cousins. Viktor comes for a few days at a time. Swim, walk, ride, shoot.

At Kövecses there is an eccentric collection of people gathered together to educate Emmy’s sisters, Gerty and Eva, twelve and fifteen years junior to her. These now include a French lady’s maid to give them a proper Parisian accent, an elderly schoolmaster to teach them the three Rs, a governess from Trieste for German and Italian, and finally a failed concert pianist (Mr Minotti) to teach them music and chess. Emmy’s mother gives them English dictation and reads Shakespeare with them. There is also the elderly Viennese boot-maker who makes the white suede boots about which Evelina is so very particular. Struck low, he comes to convalesce on the estate, is given a pleasant sunny room and stays for the rest of his life, keeping her in footwear and taking charge of the dogs.

The traveller Patrick Leigh Fermor stayed in Kövecses on his walk across Europe in the 1930s and described it as still having the atmosphere of an English rectory, with piles of books in all possible languages and desks cluttered with odd objects made from antlers and silver. It was ‘Liberty Hall’, said Pips, welcoming him in his perfect English to the library. Kövecses radiated the sense of self-sufficiency that comes about when there are lots of children in a big house. In my father’s blue paper folder there is a yellowing manuscript of a play called
Der Grossherzog
(
The Archduke
) put on one summer before the First World War by all the cousins in the drawing-room. Babies under two and dogs are strictly forbidden.

Mr Minotti plays the piano each night after dinner. The children play ‘Kim’s game’. Objects – a card case, pince-nez, a shell and once, thrillingly, Pips’s revolver – are placed on a tray and brought in uncovered for thirty seconds. The linen is replaced and you then write down what you can recall. Elisabeth, boringly, wins every single time.

Pips invites his cosmopolitan friends to stay.

December is Vienna and Christmas. Though they are Jewish, they celebrate with lots of presents.

And Emmy’s life seems set, not exactly in stone, but in amber. It seems preserved, the series of period stories, both generic and precious, that I promised myself I would escape from when I set out a year ago. The netsuke seem so far away as I keep circling the Palais.

I extend my stay in Vienna at the Pension Baronesse. They have kindly fixed my glasses, but the world is still slightly askew. I can’t shake off my anxiety. My uncle in London has been searching for information for me and has produced twelve pages of a memoir that my grandmother Elisabeth wrote about growing up in the Palais, and I have brought them to read
in situ
. It is a sunny morning of breath-catching cold and I take them to the Café Central, with light streaming through the Gothic windows. There is a model of the writer Peter Altenberg holding the menu, and everything is very clean and carefully presented. This was Viktor’s second café, I think, before it all went so wrong.

The café, this street, Vienna itself is a theme park: a
fin-de-siècle
film-set, glitteringly Secessionist. Fiacres trundling round with coachmen in greatcoats. The waiters have period moustaches. Strauss is everywhere, seeping from the chocolate shops. I keep expecting Mahler to walk in, or Klimt to start an argument. I keep thinking of a dreadful film I saw years ago when I was at university. It was set in Paris, and Picasso kept walking past, and Gertrude Stein and James Joyce were discussing Modernism over their Pernod. This is the problem I’m having here, I realise, assailed by one cliché after another. My Vienna has thinned into other people’s Vienna.

I’ve been reading the seventeen novels of Joseph Roth, the Austrian Jewish novelist, some set in Vienna during the last years of the Hapsburg Empire. It is in the unimpeachable Efrussi Bank – Roth spells it in the Russian manner – that Trotta deposits his wealth in
The Radetzky March
. Ignace Ephrussi himself is sketched as a rich jeweller in
The Spider’s Web
: ‘lank and tall, and always [wearing] black, with a high collared coat which just revealed a black silk stock pinned by a pearl the size of a hazelnut’. His wife, the beautiful Frau Efrussi, is ‘a lady: Jewish: but a lady’. Everyone had an easy life, says Theodor, the young and bitter Gentile protagonist, employed by the family as a tutor, ‘the Efrussis the easiest of all…Pictures in gold frames hung in the hall and a footman in green and gold livery bowed as he escorted you in.’

The real keeps slipping out of my hands. The lives of my family in Vienna were refracted into books, just like Charles in Proust’s Paris. The dislike of the Ephrussi keeps turning up in novels.

I stumble. I realise that I do not understand what it means to be part of an assimilated, acculturated Jewish family. I simply don’t understand. I know what they didn’t do: they never went to synagogue, but their births and marriages are recorded here by the Rabbinate. I know that they paid their dues to the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde, the IKA, gave money to Jewish charities. I’ve been to see Joachim and Ignace’s mausoleum in the Jewish section of the cemetery, and worried about its broken cast-iron gate and whether I should pay to get it fixed. Zionism didn’t seem to hold many attractions, for them. I remember those rude comments from Herzl when he wrote to them for donations and got brushed off. The Ephrussi, speculators. I wonder whether it was plain embarrassment at the fervent Jewishness of the enterprise and not wanting to attract attention to themselves. Or whether it was a symptom of their confidence in their new homeland here on Zionstrasse, or on the rue de Monceau. They simply didn’t see why others needed another Zion.

Does assimilation mean that they never came up against naked prejudice? Does it mean that you understood where the limits of your social world were and you stuck to them? There is a Jockey Club in Vienna, as in Paris, and Viktor was a member, but Jews weren’t allowed to hold office. Did this matter to him in the slightest? It was understood that married Gentile women never visited Jewish households, never came to leave a card, never visited on one of the interminable afternoons. Vienna meant that only Gentile bachelors, Count Mensdorff, Count Lubienski, the young Prince of Montenuovo, left cards and were then invited. Once married they never came, no matter how good the dinners were, or how pretty the hostess. Did this matter at all? These seem such gossamer threads of rudeness.

I spend my last morning of this visit in the records of the Vienna Jewish community next to the synagogue off Judengasse. There are police nearby. In the latest elections the far right has just won a third of the popular vote, and no one knows if the synagogue is a target. There have been so many threats that I must pass through a complex security system. Finally inside, I watch as the archivist pulls out the folio records, one striped volume after another, and lays them on the lectern. Each birth and marriage and death, each conversion, the whole of Jewish Vienna faithfully recorded.