The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [100]
I stand on the balcony of the second floor. I have bought a netsuke back with me, the pale-brown one of three chestnuts with the small white grub in ivory, and I realise that I’m worrying away at it in my pocket, tumbling it round and round. I hold the balcony rail hard and look down to the marble floor and think of Emmy’s dressing-table falling. I think of the netsuke undisturbed in their vitrine.
And I hear a group of businessmen come in down the passageway from the Ringstrasse for a meeting in the offices, a knot of talk and laughter, and I hear how the faintest echo of the street comes in with them. It is those voices that make me remember Iggie. He said that the old doorkeeper, Herr Kirchner, who used to swing the gates of the Palais Ephrussi open with a flourish and a low bow to amuse the children, had conveniently gone out and left the gates to the Ringstrasse wide open on the day the Nazis came.
Six members of the Gestapo, in perfect uniforms, walk straight in.
They start out quite polite. They have orders to search the apartment as they have reason to believe that the Jew Ephrussi has supported the Schuschnigg campaign.
Searching. Searching means this: every single drawer is wrenched open, the contents of every cupboard pulled out, every single ornament is scrutinised. Do you know how much stuff there is in this house, how many drawers in how many rooms? The Gestapo are methodical. They are in no hurry. This is no Wilde. The drawers in the little tables in the salon are rifled through, papers scattered. The study is taken apart. The filed catalogues of incunabula are swept through for evidence, letters winnowed. Every drawer in the Italian cabinet is probed. Books are pulled off the shelves in the library and examined and dropped. They reach deep into the linen closets. Pictures are taken off walls and the stretchers are checked. The tapestries in the dining-room where the children used to hide are jerked away from the wall.
After they have searched the twenty-four rooms in the family apartment, the kitchens and the servants’ hall, the Gestapo request the keys to the safe, to the silver-room and to the porcelain store where the plates are stacked, service by service. They need the key to the boxroom in the corner, where all the hatboxes, the trunks, the crates with the children’s toys, the nursery books, the old Andrew Lang fairy stories are kept. They need the keys for the cabinet in Viktor’s dressing-room where he keeps his letters from Emmy, from his father, from his old tutor Herr Wessel, the good Prussian, the man who taught him about German values, made him read Schiller. They take Viktor’s keys to the office at the bank.
And all these things, a world of things – a family geography stretching from Odessa, from holidays in Petersburg, in Switzerland, in the South of France, Paris, Kövesces, London, everything – is gone through and noted down. Every object, every incident, is suspect. This is a scrutiny that every Jewish family in Vienna is undergoing.
At the end of these long hours there is a cursory consultation and the Jew Viktor Ephrussi is accused of having contributed 5,000 schillings to the Schuschnigg campaign and this has made him an enemy of the State. He and Rudolf are arrested. They are taken away.
Emmy is allowed two rooms at the back of the house. I go into these rooms. They are small and high and very dark, and an opaque window above the door lets in a little light from the courtyard. She is not allowed to use the main staircase, not allowed to go into their old rooms. She has no servants. She has – at this moment – only her clothes.
I do not know where Viktor and Rudolf were taken. I cannot find the records. I