The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [112]
The netsuke had been moved around before. Ever since they had arrived from Japan they had been appraised: picked up, examined, weighed in the hand, placed again. That is what dealers do. It is what collectors do, and it is what children do. But when I think of the netsuke in Anna’s apron pocket with a duster or a spool of thread, I think that these netsuke have never received so much care. It is April 1938 and, with the Anschluss still giddy with proclamations, the art historians are working dedicatedly on the inventories, pasting photographs into the Gestapo folders to be sent to Berlin, and the librarians are marking up their lists of books so diligently. They are preserving art for their country. And Rosenberg needs Judaica to prove his theories on the animality of the Jews for his institute. Everyone is working so hard, but none of them come near the dedication and diligence of Anna. With Anna sleeping on them, the netsuke are looked after with more respect than anyone has ever shown them. She has survived the hunger and the looting, and the fires and the Russian invasion.
Netsuke are small and hard. They are hard to chip, hard to break: each one is made to be knocked around in the world. ‘A netsuke must be devised so as not to be a nuisance to the user,’ says a guide. They hold themselves inwards: a deer tucking its legs beneath its body; the barrel-maker crouching inside his half-finished barrel; the rats a tumble around the hazelnut. Or my favourite, a monk asleep over his alms bowl; one continuous line of back. They can be painful: the end of the ivory bean-pod is as sharp as a knife. I think of them inside a mattress, a strange mattress where boxwood and ivory from Japan meet Austrian horsehair.
Touch is not only through the fingers, but through the whole body, too.
Each one of these netsuke for Anna is a resistance to the sapping of memory. Each one carried out is a resistance against the news, a story recalled, a future held on to. Here that Viennese cult of Gemütlichkeit – the easy tears over sentimental stories, the wrapping of everything in pastry and cream, the melancholy falling away from happiness, those candied pictures of servant girls and their beaux – meets a place of adamantine hardness. I think of Herr Brockhaus and his imprecations against the carelessness of servants, and I think of how wrong he was.
There is no sentimentality, no nostalgia. It is something much harder, literally harder. It is a kind of trust.
I heard Anna’s story a long time ago. I heard it in Tokyo, the first time I saw the netsuke lit up in a long glass vitrine held between bookcases. Iggie had made me a gin and tonic, and himself a Scotch and soda, and he said – in passing, under his breath – that they were a hidden story. By which he meant, I think now, not that he was hesitant of telling the story, but that the story was about hiddenness.
I knew the story. I didn’t feel the story until my third visit to Vienna, when I was standing in the courtyard of the Palais with a man from the offices of Casino Austria who asked me if I wanted to see the secret floor.
We went up the Opera Stairs and he pushed part of the panelling on the left and we ducked through into a whole floor, room after room with no windows to the outside: when you stand on the Ring, the eye moves unimpeded from street level to Ignace’s grand floor. It maps the great rooms above, but each of these is compressed. There are only small, opaque square windows into the courtyard, insignificant enough to be disguised as part of the treatment of the wall. The only way on or off the floor is either through the door disguised as a panel of marble that leads onto the grand stairs or via the servants’ stair in the corner to the courtyard. It is the floor of servants’ rooms.
The place where Anna slept is now the company cafeteria. Standing amongst the bustle of a workday