The Hare with Amber Eyes (31 page)

It must have been in the 1970s that Iggie pasted little numbers onto the netsuke, drew up a list of what they all were and had them assessed. They were surprisingly valuable. The tiger was the star.

This is finally when the netsuke carvers regain their names and start to become people with families, craftsmen in a particular landscape. The stories start to settle around them:

Early in the nineteenth century there lived in Gifu a carver named Tomokazu, who excelled in making netsuke animal figures. One day he left home lightly clad as if he were going to the public bath, and nothing was heard of him for three or four days. His family and the neighbours were greatly concerned about what had become of him, when suddenly he returned. He explained the reason for his disappearance, saying that he had intended to carve a netsuke of a deer and had gone into the depths of the mountains, where he watched intently the way these animals lived, eating nothing during the whole time. He is said to have accomplished the intended work, based on his observations in the mountains…It was not rare that a month or even two months were spent in making a single netsuke…

When I go to my cabinet I find four small tortoises climbing on each other’s backs. I look up the number on Iggie’s list and it is by Tomokazu. It is made from boxwood, the colour of a
caffè macchiato
. It is very small, and has been carved so that when you roll it in your hands you feel the slippery tortoises struggling over one another, round and round and round. As I hold it, I know that this man did look at tortoises.

Iggie made notes on the queries by scholars and by a dealer or two who came to see the collection. Why should anyone think that signing a piece simplifies matters? Signing is the start of questions of Byzantine complexity. Are the strokes done with authority or are they hesitant? How many strokes have gone into a character? Is it enclosed within a border? If so, what is the shape of the cartouche? What about alternative readings of the characters? And, my favourite, a question of almost scholastic profundity: what is the relationship between a great carver and a poor signature?

I can’t cope with this, so I look at the patination. And then I read up on it:

To Occidentals it may seem that a difference in polish is only a matter of formula and application. In point of fact, polish is a very important process in the creation of a fine netsuke. It comprises a series of boilings, dryings and rubbings with various ingredients and materials that are carefully guarded secrets. A fine polish requires three or four days of laborious patience and conscientious care. The thick, rich, brown polish of the younger Toyozaku, although fine, is not of such eclipsing excellence.

So I take out my tiger with the yellow-horn inlaid eyes by the younger Toyokazu of the Tamba school. This carver worked in fine, dense boxwood and was well known for the mobility he achieved in his animals. Mine has a striped tail that is a whiplash up his back. I take it out for a day or two, and once, stupidly, leave it on my notes in the fifth-floor stacks (Biography K–S) at the London Library while I go for coffee. But he is still there when I get back, my non-eclipsing tiger with his glowing eyes in his rich, brown scowling face.

He is pure menace. He has seen off the other readers.

TOKYO, ODESSA, LONDON 2001–2009

I am back in Tokyo, walking up from the underground station past the isotonic drink machines. It is September and I haven’t been here for a couple of years. The machines are new. Some things change slowly in Tokyo. There are still the few raggedy wooden houses with their washing pegged out next to the silvery condominiums. Mrs X at the sushi restaurant is cleaning the steps.

I stay with Jiro, as I always do. He is in his early eighties, busy. He goes to the Opera, of course, and the theatre. And he has spent a few years going to a pottery class and making tea-bowls and small dishes for soy sauce. Jiro has left Iggie’s apartment unchanged since he died fifteen years ago. The pens are still in their holder and the blotter is still central on the desk. This is where I’m staying.

I’ve brought a tape-recorder and we fiddle with it for a while and then give up, watch the news and have a drink and some toast and pâté. I am here for three days to ask him more about his life with Iggie, and check that I have not remembered anything incorrectly in the story of the netsuke. I want to make sure that I have the story of Iggie and Jiro’s first meeting correct, the name of the street where they had their first house together. It is one of those conversations that needs to happen, but I’m worried about its formality.

I’m jet-lagged and awake at three-thirty in the morning. I make myself coffee. I run my hands along Iggie’s bookcases, the old children’s books from Vienna, complete runs of Len Deighton next to Proust, trying to find something to read. I take down some old copies of
Architectural Digest
, which I love for their glamorous adverts for Chryslers and Chivas Regal whisky, and I find sandwiched between June and July 1966 an envelope containing very old documents, official-looking, in Russian. I walk round and round. I’m not sure I can cope with any more surprising envelopes.

I look up at the pictures salvaged from the Palais, which used to hang in Viktor’s study at the end of the corridor, and at the gold screen with the irises on it that Iggie bought in Kyoto in the 1950s. I pick up an old Chinese bowl with deeply carved petals. The incisions hold the green glaze. I suppose I’ve known it for thirty years now and it still feels good.

This whole room has been part of my life for so long that I can’t watch it, distance myself from it. I can’t inventory it, as I did Charles’s rooms in the rue de Monceau and the avenue d’Iéna, or Emmy’s dressing-room in Vienna.

I fall asleep at dawn.

Jiro makes good breakfasts. We have excellent coffee and pawpaw and tiny
pains au chocolat
from one of the Ginza bakeries. And then we take a deep breath and he starts to tell me for the first time about the day the war ended, how on 15th August 1945 he was recuperating from a slight case of pleurisy and was bored. He had come up to Tokyo to see a friend and they were going home on the afternoon train to Izu. ‘It was not easy to get train tickets, and we were chatting on the train when we saw women wearing very colourful clothes. And we couldn’t believe it. We hadn’t seen colour for years and years. And we heard the news that a few hours earlier there had been the declaration of surrender.’

We talk through the journeys I’ve been on in search of the history of the netsuke, all the vagabonding. We look at the photographs I’ve taken in Paris and Vienna and I show him a clipping from last week’s newspaper. A pink and gold Fabergé egg that opens to reveal a diamond-studded cockerel – commissioned by Iggie’s great-aunt Béatrice Ephrussi-Rothschild – has just become the most expensive Russian object ever auctioned. And because we are in Iggie’s old apartment, Jiro opens up the vitrine once again and reaches in to pick up a netsuke.

And then he suggests that we go out tonight. There is a new restaurant he has heard good things of, and we could see a film.

It is November and I need to go to Odessa. It is nearly two years since I began this journey and I’ve been everywhere else but the city where the Ephrussi family started. I want to see the Black Sea and imagine the grain warehouses on the edge of the seaport. And perhaps, if I stand in the house where Charles and my great-grandfather Viktor were born, I will understand. I am not sure what I will understand. Why they left? What it means to leave? I think I’m looking for a beginning.

I meet Thomas, my youngest brother, and the tallest, who has travelled from Moldova by taxi. He is an expert on conflict in the Caucasus. It is a journey that has taken him five hours. Thomas, who is writing on Odessa and speaks Russian, is blasé about borders. He has been held up, laughs that it’s always a problem whether to bribe or not. I worry about visas: he doesn’t. We haven’t been on a trip together for twenty-five years, since we were students and went off around the Greek islands. He speaks Greek, too. He was pretty competent then, I remember suddenly. Anatoly, the Moldovan taxi driver, sets off.

We bump along the outskirts of ravaged apartment blocks and decaying factories, overtaken by huge black 4x4s with tinted windows and by old Fiats, until we meet the wide avenues of old Odessa. No one told me, I tell Thomas petulantly, that it was so beautiful, that there were catalpa trees alongside the pavements, that there were courtyards glimpsed through open doors, shallow oak steps, that there were balconies. Some of Odessa is being restored, plasterwork repaired and stucco repainted, while other buildings sink in Piranesian squalor with looping cables, sagging roofs, gates off their hinges and missing capitals to the pillars.

We come to a full stop outside the Hotel Londonskaya, a Belle Époque palazzo of gilt and marble on the Primorsky Boulevard. Queen is playing softly in the foyer. The Boulevard is a great promenade, a run of classical buildings washed in yellows and pale blues. It stretches an either side of the Potemkin Steps, made famous in Eisenstein’s film
The Battleship Potemkin
. There are 192 steps with ten landings, designed so that when you look down you see only landings, and when you look up you see only steps.

Climb these steps slowly. When you reach the top, avoid the predatory hawkers of Soviet navy hats, the begging sailor with the poem round his neck, and the man dressed as Peter the Great who wants you to pay for a photograph with him. To the front is the statue of the Duc de Richelieu, the early nineteenth-century governor of the region brought in from France to plan the city, in his toga. Walk past him and on through the curved arcs of golden buildings, two perfect parentheses, and you reach Catherine the Great surrounded by her favourites. For fifty years there was a Soviet statue here, but now Catherine is being restored to her old position, courtesy of a local oligarch. Granite setts are being laid around her feet.

Turn right at the top of the steps and the promenade runs between two avenues of chestnut trees and dusty flowerbeds until the punctum of the Governor’s Palace, the site of famous parties. It is severe and Doric.

Each view is calibrated. There are landmarks to walk between: the Pushkin statue commemorating his stay here, a cannon captured from the British during the Crimean War. This is where the evening
passeggiata
would take place, ‘the twilight walking to and fro, gossiping and even…liberal amounts of flirting’. Higher up is the Opera House modelled on Vienna’s, where Jewish and Greek factions supporting this season’s new Italian singers would take their name – the ‘Montechellisti’, ‘the Carraristi’ – and fight. This is not a city around a cathedral or a fortress. It is a Hellenic city of merchants and poets, and this is its bourgeois agora.

In a junk shop in an arcade I buy some Soviet medals for my kids and a couple of nineteenth-century postcards. In one it is high summer, perhaps July, late in the century. It is the middle of the day, as the shadows of the chestnut trees are short. The promenade was ‘cool even at noon in the heat of midsummer’, said an Odessan poet. A woman with a parasol moves down the promenade away from the Pushkin statue, while a nanny pushes an enormous black perambulator. You can just see the dome of the funicular railway that carries people up and down to the port. Beyond that there is a line of the masts of ships in the bay.

Postcard of the promenade in Odessa in 1880. The bank and Ephrussi mansion are the second and third buildings on the left

Turn left at the top of the steps and you look all the way down to the Stock Exchange, a Corinthian villa in which to conduct your business. It is now the Hôtel de Ville and a banner welcomes a Belgian delegation. It is early November and so mild that we walk down the street in our shirt-sleeves. We pass some mansions, then the Hôtel, and three buildings down is the Ephrussi bank, with the family house next door. This is where Jules and Ignace and Charles were born. It is where Viktor was born. We go round the back.

It is a mess. The stucco is coming off in great gouts, the balconies are shedding, there is a bit of slippage amongst the putti. When I come up close I see it has been refaced too, replastered, and those are certainly not original windows. But right at the top is a single balcony in which the double E of the family hangs on.

I hesitate. Thomas, who is good at this, fearless, walks through the broken gates under the arch into the yard behind the Ephrussi house. Here are the stable blocks with their floors of dark stone. It is ballast, he says over his shoulder, lava from Sicily brought in on the grain ships. Grain out. Lava back. A dozen men, suddenly silent, drinking tea, a Citroën 2CV up on blocks. There is a chained Alsatian barking. The yard is full of dust. It has three skips full of timber and plaster and broken stone. He finds the foreman in a shiny leather jacket. Yes, you can go in – you’re lucky, it is just being renovated, new everything, beautifully done, a real success, on schedule, a quality job. We have just put laboratories into the basement, fire doors and a sprinkler system. It is the offices next. We had to get rid of all of the old house, it was shot, hopeless. You should have seen it a month ago!

I should have. I am too late. What can I touch here in this stripped-out hulk? It has no ceilings, only steel girders and electric cabling. It has no floors, only concrete screed. The walls have just been plastered, the windows have been reglazed. Some ironwork is up for partitions. They have taken out all the doors, except for one in oak, destined for the skips tomorrow. The only thing left is the volume, the scale of these rooms, sixteen feet high.

There is nothing here.

Thomas and the shiny man are racing ahead, talking Russian. ‘This house was the headquarters of the steamship company since the Revolution. Before that? God knows! Now? The headquarters of the Marine Hygiene Inspection Office. That’s why we’ve put in the laboratories.’ They are fast. I have to keep moving.

We are almost out the door and into the dusty yard when I double back. I am wrong. I am back up the staircase and I put my hand on the cast-iron balustrade, each column topped with a blackened ear of wheat of the Efrussi, the wheat from the granary of the black soil of the Ukraine that made them rich. And while my brother calls up, I go and stand next to a window and look out across the promenade through the double avenue of chestnut trees, the dusty paths and the benches to the Black Sea.

The Efrussi boys are still here.

Some traces are fugitive. The Efrussi live in the stories of Isaac Babel, the Jewish chronicler of downtown life, the gangs of the slums. An Efrussi bribes his way into the gymnasium ahead of an abler, poorer student. They are in the Yiddish tales of Sholem Aleichem. A poor man from the shtetl treks to Odessa to beg for help from Efrussi the banker. And the banker refuses. There is a Yiddish saying,
lebn vi Got in Odes
– ‘to live like God in Odessa’ – and the Efrussi live like gods on their Zionstrasse.

Some traces are more concrete. After one of the pogroms the brothers founded an Efrussi orphanage. There is the Efrussi School for Jewish children, endowed by Ignace in honour of his father, the patriarch, and supported over thirty years by new endowments from Charles and Jules and Viktor. It is still there on the edge of a dusty park with feral dogs and ripped-up benches, two low buildings slung together alongside the tram line. In 1892 the school reports the receipt of 1,200 roubles donated by the Efrussi brothers. The school authorities have bought from St Petersburg an astrolabe, a menzula, a globe, a steel knife for cutting glass, a skeleton and a demountable model of an eye. In an Odessan bookshop they have spent 533 roubles and 64 kopeks and bought 280 volumes by Beecher Stowe, Swift, Tolstoy, Cowper, Thackeray and Scott. With the remainder there is money to purchase coats, blouses and trousers for twenty-five poor Jewish boys, so that they can read
Ivanhoe
or
Vanity Fair
without shivering, covered up from the Odessan dust.

The dust in Paris on the rue Monceau, the dust in Vienna as they build the Ringstrasse: nothing compares to this dust. ‘The dust lies like a universal shroud of some two or three inches thick,’ writes Shirley Brooks in
The Russians of the South
in 1854. ‘The slightest breeze flings it over the town in clouds, the lightest footstep sends it flying high in dense heaps. When I tell you that hundreds of the carriages driven at high speed…are perpetually racing about, and that the sea breezes are as perpetually rushing through the streets, the statement that Odessa lives in a cloud is no figure of speech.’ It was a city on the make: ‘a stirring, business-look about the streets and the stores; fast walkers; a familiar
new
look about the houses and everything, yes, and a driving and smothering dust…’ according to Mark Twain. It makes sense to me, suddenly, that the Efrussi children grow up with dust.

Thomas and I arrange to meet Sasha, a small dapper academic in his seventies. On the corner he bumps into an old friend, a professor of comparative literature, so we all stroll up to the school together, Tom and Sasha talking in Russian and the professor and I talking in English about the International Shakespearian Institute. When we get to the school the professor peels off and the three of us sit in the park café drinking sweet coffee, glared at by the three prostitutes at the bar who periodically juke-box us. I tell Sasha why we’ve come, that I’m writing a book about – I stumble to a halt. I no longer know if this book is about my family, or memory, or myself, or is still a book about small Japanese things.

He tells me politely that Gorky collected netsuke. We drink more coffee. I have brought the envelope of documents that I found in Iggie’s flat in Tokyo between the old copies of
Architectural Digest
. Sasha is appalled that I’ve brought the originals, and not copies, but as I watch him he is like a pianist, playing with the different papers.

There are records of the fearsome Ignace, the builder of the Palais, as Consul in Odessa for the Swedish and Norwegian crown, an imperial notification from the Tsar that he is allowed to wear a Bessarabian medal, papers from the Rabbinate. This is the old paper, Sasha says, they changed this in 1870; that is the stamp, that is the fee. Here is the signature of the governor, always so emphatic – look, it has almost gone through the paper. Look at the address of this one, the corner of X and Y! It is very Odessan. This is a clerk’s copy, poor writing.

As Sasha handles the desiccated records and they flicker into life, I look at the envelope for the first time. It is addressed in Viktor’s handwriting, sent out from Kövecses to Elisabeth in September 1938. This bundle of documents meant something to Viktor and to Iggie. It was the family archive. I place them carefully back.

On the way back to the hotel we duck into a synagogue. The Odessan Jews are so worldly, it was said, that they stubbed out their cigarettes on its walls. There is a circle of hell put aside just for them. It is busy in here today. There is a school run by young men from Tel Aviv in progress. They are restoring part of the building, and one of the students comes over to greet us in English. We look in, not wanting to disturb them, and there up on the left neat to the front, is the yellow armchair. It is a seder chair, the chair for the elect, the special chair set apart.

Charles’s yellow armchair was invisible in plain sight. It was so obvious that it disappeared when placed among the Degas and the Moreaus and the cabinet of netsuke in his Parisian salon. It is a pun, a Jewish joke.

As I stand in front of the museum with its statue of a wrestling Laocoön, the one that Charles drew for Viktor, I realise how wrong I’ve been. I thought the boys left Odessa to get their education in Vienna and in Paris. I thought that Charles went off on his Grand Tour in order to broaden his horizons, to get away from the provinces and learn about the Classics. But this whole city is a classical world balancing above the port. Here, a hundred yards from their house on the boulevard, was a museum that held rooms and rooms of antiquities, the Greek artefacts that were dug up as the town became a city, doubling in size every decade. Of course Odessa had scholars and collectors. Just because Odessa was a dusty city, with its stevedores and sailors, stokers, fishermen, divers, smugglers, adventurers, swindlers, and their grandfather Joachim, the great chancer in his Palais, did not mean that it was not full of writers and artists too.