The Hare with Amber Eyes (26 page)

There are two women, one of them older. The younger is now middle-aged with grey hair.

They meet again after a war. It has been eight years since they last met.

They meet in one of the old rooms, now an office full of the clatter of filing. Or they meet in the damp courtyard. All I can see is two women, each of whom has a story.

27th April. Six weeks after the
Anschluss
, the day the doors to the Ringstrasse were left open by Otto Kirchner and the Gestapo came in. It was the start of Aryanisation. Anna was told she could no longer work for Jews, and that she was to work for her country. She was to make herself useful and help sort out the belongings of the previous occupiers, pack them into wooden crates. They had lots to do, and she should start by packing up the silver in the silver-room.

There were crates everywhere, and the Gestapo made lists. Once she’d wrapped something, it was ticked off. After the silver it was porcelain. All around her people were busy taking the apartment to pieces. It was the day Viktor and Rudolf were arrested and taken away, and Emmy was barred from the apartment and sent to the rooms on the other side of the courtyard.

They were taking the silver. ‘And your mother’s jewellery, the porcelain, your mother’s dresses.’ And the clocks that Anna had wound (library, hall, salon, the Baron’s dressing-room every week), the books from the library, the lovely porcelain figures of the clowns in the salon. Everything. She had looked to see what she could save for Emmy and the children.

‘I couldn’t carry anything precious away for you. So I would slip three or four of the little figures from the Baroness’s dressing-room, the little toys you played with when you were children – you remember – and I put them into the pocket of my apron whenever I was passing, and I took them to my room. I hid them in the mattress of my bed. It took me two weeks to get them all out of the big glass case. You remember how many there were!

‘And they didn’t notice. They were so busy. They were busy with all the grand things – the Baron’s paintings and the gold service from the safe, and the cabinets from the drawing-room, and the statues and all your mother’s jewellery. And all the Baron’s old books that he loved so much. They didn’t notice the little figures.

‘So I just took them. And I put them in my mattress and I slept on them. Now you are back, I have something to return to you.’

In December 1945 Anna gave Elisabeth 264 Japanese netsuke.

This is the third resting-place in the story of the netsuke.

From Charles and Louise in Paris, the vitrine in the lambent yellow room with all those Impressionist pictures, to Emmy and her children in Vienna, the interweaving of stories and dressing up, childhood and make-believe, to this strange bedding-down with Anna in her room.

The netsuke had been moved around before. Ever since they had arrived from Japan they had been appraised: picked up, examined, weighed in the hand, placed again. That is what dealers do. It is what collectors do, and it is what children do. But when I think of the netsuke in Anna’s apron pocket with a duster or a spool of thread, I think that these netsuke have never received so much care. It is April 1938 and, with the
Anschluss
still giddy with proclamations, the art historians are working dedicatedly on the inventories, pasting photographs into the Gestapo folders to be sent to Berlin, and the librarians are marking up their lists of books so diligently. They are preserving art for their country. And Rosenberg needs Judaica to prove his theories on the animality of the Jews for his institute. Everyone is working so hard, but none of them come near the dedication and diligence of Anna. With Anna sleeping on them, the netsuke are looked after with more respect than anyone has ever shown them. She has survived the hunger and the looting, and the fires and the Russian invasion.

Netsuke are small and hard. They are hard to chip, hard to break: each one is made to be knocked around in the world. ‘A netsuke must be devised so as not to be a nuisance to the user,’ says a guide. They hold themselves inwards: a deer tucking its legs beneath its body; the barrel-maker crouching inside his half-finished barrel; the rats a tumble around the hazelnut. Or my favourite, a monk asleep over his alms bowl; one continuous line of back. They can be painful: the end of the ivory bean-pod is as sharp as a knife. I think of them inside a mattress, a strange mattress where boxwood and ivory from Japan meet Austrian horsehair.

Touch is not only through the fingers, but through the whole body, too.

Each one of these netsuke for Anna is a resistance to the sapping of memory. Each one carried out is a resistance against the news, a story recalled, a future held on to. Here that Viennese cult of
Gemütlichkeit
– the easy tears over sentimental stories, the wrapping of everything in pastry and cream, the melancholy falling away from happiness, those candied pictures of servant girls and their beaux – meets a place of adamantine hardness. I think of Herr Brockhaus and his imprecations against the carelessness of servants, and I think of how wrong he was.

There is no sentimentality, no nostalgia. It is something much harder, literally harder. It is a kind of trust.

I heard Anna’s story a long time ago. I heard it in Tokyo, the first time I saw the netsuke lit up in a long glass vitrine held between bookcases. Iggie had made me a gin and tonic, and himself a Scotch and soda, and he said – in passing, under his breath – that they were a hidden story. By which he meant, I think now, not that he was hesitant of telling the story, but that the story was about hiddenness.

I knew the story. I didn’t
feel
the story until my third visit to Vienna, when I was standing in the courtyard of the Palais with a man from the offices of Casino Austria who asked me if I wanted to see the secret floor.

We went up the Opera Stairs and he pushed part of the panelling on the left and we ducked through into a whole floor, room after room with no windows to the outside: when you stand on the Ring, the eye moves unimpeded from street level to Ignace’s grand floor. It maps the great rooms above, but each of these is compressed. There are only small, opaque square windows into the courtyard, insignificant enough to be disguised as part of the treatment of the wall. The only way on or off the floor is either through the door disguised as a panel of marble that leads onto the grand stairs or via the servants’ stair in the corner to the courtyard. It is the floor of servants’ rooms.

The place where Anna slept is now the company cafeteria. Standing amongst the bustle of a workday lunchtime in Vienna, I feel that lurch of something not being right – that lurch when you have turned a page and find yourself reading without understanding. You have to go back and start again, and the words seem even more unfamiliar and sound strangely in your head.

And, said the man responsible for the house, warming to his project, have you noticed the way that light is brought into the house? How do you think the Opera Stairs have light? So we climb up the servants’ spiral staircase and push open a little door to a whole roof-landscape of iron bridges and ladders. We cross to the parapet above the caryatids and peer down so that I can see that: yes, there are hidden lightwells, too. He fetches the plans and shows me the way in which the house is connected to its neighbours, and how the subterranean passages into the cellars meant that you could bring fodder and straw in for the horses without using the front gates.

This whole solid house, inlaid and overlaid and gessoed and painted, marble and gold, was as light as a toy theatre, a run of hidden spaces behind a façade.
Potemkinsche
. This marble wall is
scagliola
, lath and plaster.

It is a house of hidden children’s toys, hidden games on the parapets above the Palais, hide-and-seek in the tunnels and the cellars, secret drawers in cabinets with lovers’ letters to Emmy. But it was also a house of unseen people and unknown lives. Food appearing from hidden kitchens, linen disappearing into hidden laundries. People sleeping in airless rooms tucked between floors.

It was a place to hide where you have come from. It was a place to hide things in.

I started the journey with my files of family letters, a sketch-map of sorts. More than a year has passed and I keep finding hidden things. Not just forgotten things: the Gestapo lists and diaries, journals, novels and poems and press-cuttings. The wills and the shipping manifests. The interviews with bankers. The overheard comments in a back room in Paris, and the swatches of cloth for dresses made for turn-of-the-century cousins in Vienna. The pictures and the furniture. I can find the lists of who came to a party a hundred years ago.

I know too much about the traces of my gilded family, but I cannot find out any more about Anna.

She is not written about, refracted into stories. She is not left money in Emmy’s will: there is no will. She does not leave traces in the ledgers of dealers or of dress-makers.

I am compelled to keep looking. In libraries, I stumble across things that lead onwards, sideways. I am looking to check a fact – the date of the yellow carpet of the winds, from Charles’s salon, something on the painter of the ceilings in the Palais Ephrussi – when I see a footnote and then a note in an appendix. I am winded to find that Louise’s house in the rue de Bassano, the one opposite Jules and Fanny’s house, up the street from Charles’s last house, all golden stone and curlicues, was used by the Nazis as one of their Paris detention camps. It was one of three annexes of the Drancy concentration camp where Jewish inmates had to sort, clean and repair furniture and objects stolen by Rosenberg’s organisation for the functionaries of the Reich.

Then, terribly, there is a note in brackets that the girl in the blue dress in Renoir’s double portrait of the daughters of Louise Cahen d’Anvers – the commission so endlessly and anxiously fussed over by Charles to raise money for Renoir – had been deported and had died in Auschwitz. And then I find that Fanny and Théodore Reinach’s son Léon and his wife Béatrice de Camondo and their two children were deported. This family died in Auschwitz in 1944.

All those old calumnies, venomous diatribes against the Jewish families on that golden hill, had their late and appalling flowering in Paris.

Here, in this house, I am wrong-footed. The survival of the netsuke in Anna’s pocket, in her mattress, is an affront. I cannot bear for it to slip into symbolism. Why should they have got through this war in a hiding-place, when so many hidden people did not? I can’t make people and places and things fit together any more. These stories unravel me.

And there are things that I have been searching for ever since I heard the story almost thirty years ago when I first met Iggie in Japan. There is a space around Anna, like that around a figure in a fresco. She was a Gentile. She had worked for Emmy since she got married. ‘She was always there,’ Iggie would say.

She gave the netsuke to Elisabeth in 1945, and Elisabeth put the persimmon and the ivory stag and the rats and the rat-catcher and the masks that she had loved when she was six, and all the rest of this world, into a little leather attaché case to take back to England. They can expand to fill a huge vitrine in a Paris salon or a dressing-room in Vienna, but they also fit into next to nothing.

I do not even know Anna’s whole name, or what happened to her. I never thought to ask, when I could have asked. She was, simply, Anna.

Elisabeth took the little attaché case with the jumble of netsuke home. England was home now: there was no question that she would take the family to live in Vienna. Iggie, demobbed from the American army and searching for work, felt the same. Returning to Vienna was something that very few Jews would do. There were 185,000 Jews in Austria at the time of the
Anschluss
. Of these only 4,500 returned; 65,459 Austrian Jews had been killed.

Nobody was called to account. The new democratic Austrian Republic established after the war gave an amnesty to 90 per cent of members of the Nazi Party in 1948, and to the SS and Gestapo by 1957.

The return of émigrés was felt to be harassment of those who had stayed. My grandmother’s novel of return to Vienna helps me understand how she felt. There is one moment of confrontation in Elisabeth’s novel that is particularly revealing. The Jewish professor is challenged as to why he returned, what he was expecting out of Austria: ‘You did choose to leave a little early. I mean you resigned before you could be dismissed – and you left the country.’ This is the key, powerful question: What do you want by coming back? Have you come back to take something from us? Have you come back as an accuser? Have you come back to show us up? And, as a tremor beneath these other questions: Could your war have been worse than our war?

Restitution was difficult for those who survived. Elisabeth fictionalises this in one of the strangest moments in the novel, when a collector, Kanakis, notices ‘two dark, heavily-framed pictures hanging on the wall just opposite his chair, and a faint smile creased his eyelids’.

‘Do you really recognise those pictures?’ exclaims the new owner. ‘They did in fact belong to a gentleman who was surely an acquaintance of your family, Baron E. You might possibly have seen them at his house. Baron E unfortunately died abroad, in England, I believe. His heirs, after they had recovered what could be traced of his property, had it all sold at auction, having no use for this old-fashioned stuff in their modern homes, I suppose. I acquired them in the auction-rooms, as well as most of the things you see in this room. All quite openly, publicly and legally, you understand. There is no great demand for this period.’

‘There is no need to apologise, Herr Doktor,’ replies Kanakis, ‘I can only congratulate you on your bargains.’

‘All quite openly, publicly and legally’ were words that Elisabeth was to hear repeated back to her. She discovered that, on the list of priorities in a shattered society, the restitution of property to those from whom it had been sequestered came near the bottom. Many of those who had appropriated Jewish property were now respected citizens of the new Austrian Republic. This was also a government that rejected reparations, because in their view Austria had been an occupied country between 1938 and 1945: Austria had become the ‘first victim’, rather than an agent in the war.

As the ‘first victim’, Austria had to hold out against those who would damage it. Dr Karl Renner, a lawyer and post-war president of Austria, was clear about this. He wrote in April 1945:

Restitution of property stolen from Jews…[should be] not to the individual victims, but to a collective restitution fund. The establishment of such and the following foreseeable arrangements is necessary in order to prevent a massive, sudden flood of returning exiles…A circumstance, that for many reasons must be paid very close attention to…Basically the entire nation should be made not liable for damages to Jews.

When, on 15th May 1946, the Republic of Austria passed a law which declared that any transactions that had made use of discriminatory Nazi ideology were to be deemed null and void, it seemed that the path was open. But the law was strangely unenforceable. If your property had been sold under the policy of forced Aryanisation, then you might be asked to buy it back. If an artwork was returned to you that was considered significant to Austria’s cultural heritage, then its export was blocked. But if you donated works to the museum, then a permit for other lesser artworks might be forthcoming.

In deciding what to return and what not to return, the government agencies used the documents to hand that held the most authority. These were those put together by the Gestapo, who were noted for their thoroughness.

One file, on the appropriation of Viktor’s collection of books, noted that a library was handed over to the Gestapo, but ‘there is no record describing its full content. However, there can only have been a small number of works, given that the document confirming the takeover mentions the content of two large and two small boxes as well as of a rotating bookshelf.’

So, on 31st March 1948, 191 books are returned from the Austrian National Library to the heirs of Viktor Ephrussi; 191 books are a couple of shelves full, a few yards out of the hundreds that made up his room.

And so it goes. Where are the records Herr Ephrussi kept? He is still held culpable, even after death. Viktor’s life of books is lost because of a document with its initials illegible.

Another file is on the appropriation of the art collection. It contains a letter between the directors of two museums. They have an inventory made by the Gestapo, and they have to sort out what happened to the pictures ‘of the banker Ephrussi, Wien I., Lueggerring 14. The inventory does not form a particularly valuable arts collection but the wall decoration from the apartment of a wealthy man. From the style it seems clearly to have been put together according to the taste of the 1870s.’

There are no receipts, but the ‘only paintings, which were not sold, were the absolutely not sellable ones’. The implication is that there is not much one can really do.

Reading these letters, I feel idiotically angry. It is not that it matters that these art historians don’t like the taste of ‘the banker Ephrussi’ and his wall decoration, though the phrase is far too close to the Gestapo’s ‘Jew Ephrussi’ for comfort. It is the way in which the archives are used to close down the past: there is no receipt for this, we cannot read that signature. It was only nine years ago, I think, and these transactions were by your colleagues. Vienna is a small city. How many calls would it take to sort this out?

My father’s childhood was punctuated by Elisabeth writing letter after letter against the backdrop of failing expectations that the family would get their fortune returned. She wrote partly from anger at the way in which pseudo-legalistic measures were put up to dissuade claimants. She was a lawyer, after all. But mostly because all four siblings were in real financial need and she was the only one in Europe.

Whenever a picture was retrieved, it was sold and the money split. The Gobelin tapestries were recovered in 1949 and sold for school fees. Five years after the war the Palais Ephrussi was returned to Elisabeth. It was not a good time to sell a war-damaged
Palais
in a city still under control of four armies, and it raised just $30,000. After that Elisabeth gave up.

Herr Steinhausser, Viktor’s former business partner who had become President of the Association of Austrian Banks and Bankers, was asked in 1952 if he knew anything of the history of the Ephrussi Bank that he had Aryanised. It was believed that the following year, 1953, would be the centenary of its foundation in Vienna. ‘Know nothing of it,’ he writes back. ‘Won’t be celebrated.’

The Ephrussi legatees received 50,000 schillings on agreeing to a renunciation of any further claim. It was the equivalent of about $5,000 at the time.

I find all this stuff about restitution exhausting. I can see how you could spend your life tracking something down, your energy sapping away with all these rules and letters and legalities. You know that on someone else’s mantelpiece is chiming the clock from the salon, with the mermaids twined liquidly around its base. You open a sales catalogue and see two ships in a gale, and suddenly you are standing by the door to the stairs with nanny wrapping a muffler around your neck ready for your walk along the Ring. For one held breath you can piece together a life, a broken setting for a diasporic family.

It was a family that could not put itself back together. Elisabeth provided a kind of centre in Tunbridge Wells, writing and relating news, sending on photographs of nieces and nephews. After the war Henk started a good job in London working for the UN relief association and they were more comfortably off. Gisela was in Mexico. She had lean times and worked as a cleaner to support the family. Rudolf was demobbed and living in Virginia. And fashion had ‘given up’ on Iggie – as he put it. He could not face working on gowns again: the thread from Vienna to Paris to New York had been broken by his battle experiences in 1944 in France.

He was now working for Bunge, an international grain exporter, an unintentional return to the patriarch’s roots in Odessa. His first assignment had been a long year in Léopoldville in the Belgian Congo, hated for both its heat and its brutality.

In October 1947 Iggie visited England between postings. He had been offered placements back in the Congo or in Japan, neither of which appealed. He travelled to Tunbridge Wells to see Elisabeth and Henk and his nephews, and to visit his father’s grave for the first time. Then he planned to make a decision about his future.

It was after supper. The boys had done their homework and were in bed. Elisabeth opened the attaché case and showed him the netsuke.

A melee of rats. The fox with inlaid eyes. The monkey wrapped around the gourd. His brindled wolf. They take a few out and put them on the kitchen table of the suburban house.

We didn’t say anything, Iggie told me. We had last looked at them together in our mother’s dressing-room, thirty years before, sitting on the yellow carpet.

It’s Japan, he said. I’ll take them back.