The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [111]
There are a few pictures still on the walls, the Junge Frau in their heavy gilt frames, some studies of Austrian landscapes in mist and the three portraits of Emmy, a grandmother and a great-aunt. The heaviest furniture is still in place, the dining-table and its chairs, a secretaire, wardrobes, beds, the vast armchairs. A few vases. What is still there seems random. Her father’s desk is still there in the library. There are some carpets on the floors. But it is still an empty house. More exactly, it is an emptied house.
The boxroom is empty. The mantelpieces are empty. The silver-room is empty and so is the safe. There is no piano. There is no Italian cabinet. No little tables inlaid with mosaic. In the library there are empty shelves. The globes are gone, the clocks are gone, the French chairs are gone. Her mother’s dressing-room is dusty. It contains a filing cabinet.
There is no desk or mirror, but there is a black-lacquer vitrine and it is empty too.
The kindly lieutenant wants to help and is chatty when he finds that Elisabeth studied in New York. Take your time, he says, look around, find what you can. I’m not sure what we can do for you. It is very cold, and he offers her a cigarette and mentions that there is an old lady who still lives here – he waves his hand – who might know more. A corporal is sent off to find the old woman.
Her name is Anna.
28. ANNA’S POCKET
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