The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [110]
In December 1945 Elisabeth decides that she has to return to Vienna to find out who and what remains. And to rescue the picture of her mother and bring it home.
Elisabeth wrote a novel about her journey. It is unpublished. And unpublishable, I think, as I appraise it in typescript, 261 pages with painstaking tippexed corrections. The rawness of its emotion makes for uncomfortable reading. In it she appears as a fictionalised Jewish Professor, Kuno Adler, returning to Vienna from America for the first time since leaving at the Anschluss.
It is a book about encounters. She writes of her character’s visceral reaction to an official on the train at the border, when asked for a passport:
It was the voice, the intonation that hit a nerve somewhere in Kuno Adler’s throat; no, below the throat, where breath and nourishment plunge into the depths of the body, a non-conscious, ungovernable nerve, in the solar plexus probably. It was the quality of that voice, of that accent, soft and yet rough, ingratiating and slightly vulgar, sensible to the ear as a certain kind of stone is to the touch – the soap-stone that is coarse-grained and spongy and slightly oily on the surface – an Austrian voice. ‘Austrian passport-control.’
The exiled professor arrives at the bombed-out station and wanders, trying to accommodate himself to the squalor, the rapacity of the poor inhabitants and the ruined landmarks. The Opera, the Stock Exchange, the Academy of Fine Arts – all destroyed. St Stephen’s a burnt-out shell.
Outside the Palais Ephrussi the professor stops:
Finally, there he was, on the Ring: the massive pile of the Natural History Museum on his right, the ramp of the Parliament building on his left, beyond it the spire of the Town Hall, and in front of him the railings of the Volksgarten and the Burgplatz. There he was, and there it all was; though the once tree-bordered footpaths across the roadway were stripped, treeless, only a few naked trunks still standing. Otherwise it was all there. And suddenly the dislocation of time which had been dizzying him with illusions and delusions snapped into focus, and he was real, everything was real, incontrovertible fact. He was there. Only the trees were not there, and this comparatively trivial sign of destruction, for which he had not been prepared, caused him incommensurate grief. Hurriedly he crossed the road, entered the park gates, sat down on a bench in a deserted avenue and wept.
Elisabeth’s childhood was spent looking through the canopy of the linden trees in front of the house. In May her bedroom was full of the scent of the flowers.
On 8th December 1945, six and a half years since she was last there, Elisabeth walks into her old home. The enormous gates are hanging off their hinges. It is now the offices of the American occupying authorities: the American Headquarters/Legal Council Property Control Sub-Section. Motorbikes and jeeps are parked in the courtyard. Most panes of the glazed roof are smashed: a bomb had landed on the building next door, destroying much of its façade and taking the Palais’ caryatids, behind which the children had hidden. There are puddles on the floor. Apollo is still there, on his plinth, paused with his lyre.
Elisabeth climbs the thirty-three steps, the family stairs, to the apartment, and she knocks and is shown in by a charming lieutenant from Virginia.
The apartment is now a series of offices, each room with desks and filing cabinets and stenographers. Lists and memoranda are tacked up on the walls. In the library a huge map of occupied Vienna is hanging above the fireplace, with the Russian, American and Allied zones marked in different colours. There is a pall of cigarette-smoke, the sound of talk and typewriters. She is taken around the offices with interest and sympathy and an air of slight disbelief that this – all this – had been a family home. The American