The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [108]
On 1st March 1939 Viktor receives his visa, ‘Good for a Single Journey’, from British passport control in Prague. The same day Elisabeth and the boys leave Switzerland. They take the train to Calais and the ferry to Dover. On 4th March Viktor arrives at Croydon airport, south of London. Elisabeth is there to meet him and takes him to the St Ermin’s Hotel in Madeira Park, Tunbridge Wells, where Henk has booked rooms for them all.
Viktor has one suitcase. He is wearing the same suit Elisabeth had seen him wear to the railway station in Vienna. She notices that on his watch-chain he still carries the key to the bookcase in the library in the Palais, the bookcase of his early printed books of history.
He is an émigré. His land of Dichter and Denker, poets and thinkers, had become the land of Richter and Henker, judges and hangmen.
27. THE TEARS OF THINGS
Viktor lived in Tunbridge Wells with my grandparents and father and uncles in a rented suburban house, called St David’s. A herringbone brick path ran from a wooden gate between two privet hedges up to a porch. It was a sturdy house with gables. There were rose beds and a vegetable garden. It was an ordinary house in an ordinary Kentish town, thirty miles south of London, safe and rather staid.
They went to the church of King Charles the Martyr for morning service on Sundays. The boys – eight, ten and fourteen years old – were sent to schools where they were not teased for their foreign accents, on the strict instructions of the headmaster. They collected shrapnel and soldiers’ buttons and made elaborate castles and boats out of cardboard. They went for walks in the beech woods at the weekends.
Elisabeth, who had never cooked in her life, learnt to prepare meals. Her former cook, now living in England, sent her letters that ran to pages, with recipes for Salzburger Nockerln and schnitzel, and meticulous instructions: ‘the honoured lady slowly tilts the frying pan’.
She tutored neighbours’ children in Latin for housekeeping money, and translated to make enough to buy the boys their bicycles, £8 each. She tried to write poetry again, but found she could not. In 1940 she wrote an essay on Socrates and Nazism – three pages of fury – and sent it to her friend the philosopher Eric Voegelin in America. She continued her correspondence with her scattered family. Gisela and Alfredo and her boys were in Mexico. Rudolf was still in small-town Arkansas: he sends her a cutting from The Paragould Soliphone about ‘Rudolf Ephrussi, Baron Ephrussi as he would have been in the old country, a long, good-looking lad, teasing the latest tunes out of his saxophone’. Pips and Olga were in Switzerland. Aunt Gerty had escaped from Czechoslavakia and now lived in London, but there was still no news of Elisabeth’s aunt Eva or uncle Jenö, last seen in Kövesces.
Henk, my grandfather, commuted up to London on the 8.18 and was involved in helping to sort out where the Dutch merchant shipping fleet was, and where it should have been.
And Viktor sat in a chair by the kitchen range, the only warm place in the house. He followed the news of the war in The Times every day and took the Kentish Gazette on Thursdays. He read Ovid, particularly Tristia, his poems of exile. When he read, he ran his hand over his face so that the children couldn’t see what the poet did to him. He read for most of the day, apart from a short walk up Blatchingdon Road and back, and a nap. Occasionally he walked all the way into the centre of the town to Hall’s second-hand bookshop, where the bookseller Mr Pratley was particularly kind to Viktor as he ran his hands along the shelves of Galsworthy, Sinclair Lewis and H. G. Wells.
Sometimes when the boys came back from school he told them about Aeneas and his return to Carthage. There, on the walls,