The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [113]
And, said the man responsible for the house, warming to his project, have you noticed the way that light is brought into the house? How do you think the Opera Stairs have light? So we climb up the servants’ spiral staircase and push open a little door to a whole roof-landscape of iron bridges and ladders. We cross to the parapet above the caryatids and peer down so that I can see that: yes, there are hidden lightwells, too. He fetches the plans and shows me the way in which the house is connected to its neighbours, and how the subterranean passages into the cellars meant that you could bring fodder and straw in for the horses without using the front gates.
This whole solid house, inlaid and overlaid and gessoed and painted, marble and gold, was as light as a toy theatre, a run of hidden spaces behind a façade. Potemkinische. This marble wall is scagliola, lath and plaster.
It is a house of hidden children’s toys, hidden games on the parapets above the Palais, hide-and-seek in the tunnels and the cellars, secret drawers in cabinets with lovers’ letters to Emmy. But it was also a house of unseen people and unknown lives. Food appearing from hidden kitchens, linen disappearing into hidden laundries. People sleeping in airless rooms tucked between floors.
It was a place to hide where you have come from. It was a place to hide things in.
I started the journey with my files of family letters, a sketch-map of sorts. More than a year has passed and I keep finding hidden things. Not just forgotten things: the Gestapo lists and diaries, journals, novels and poems and press-cuttings. The wills and the shipping manifests. The interviews with bankers. The overheard comments in a back room in Paris, and the swatches of cloth for dresses made for turn-of-the-century cousins in Vienna. The pictures and the furniture. I can find the lists of who came to a party a hundred years ago.
I know too much about the traces of my gilded family, but I cannot find out any more about Anna.
She is not written about, refracted into stories. She is not left money in Emmy’s will: there is no will. She does not leave traces in the ledgers of dealers or of dress-makers.
I am compelled to keep looking. In libraries, I stumble across things that lead onwards, sideways. I am looking to check a fact – the date of the yellow carpet of the winds, from Charles’s salon, something on the painter of the ceilings in the Palais Ephrussi – when I see a footnote and then a note in an appendix. I am winded to find that Louise’s house in the rue Bassano, the one opposite Jules and Fanny’s house, up the street from Charles’s last house, all golden stone and curlicues, was used by the Nazis as one of their Paris detention camps. It was one of three annexes of the Drancy concentration camp where Jewish inmates had to sort, clean and repair furniture and objects stolen by Rosenberg’s organisation for the functionaries of the Reich.
Then, terribly, there is a note in brackets that the girl in the blue dress in Renoir’s double portrait of the daughters of Louise Cahen d’Anvers – the commission so endlessly and anxiously fussed over by Charles to raise money for Renoir – had been deported and had died in Auschwitz. And then I find that Fanny and Theodore Reinach’s son Leon and his wife Beatrice Camondo and their two children were deported. This family died in Auschwitz in 1944.
All those old calumnies, venomous diatribes against the Jewish families on that golden hill, had their late and appalling flowering in Paris.
Here, in this house, I am wrong-footed. The survival of the netsuke in Anna’s pocket, in her mattress, is an affront. I cannot bear for it to slip into symbolism. Why should they have got through this war in a hiding-place, when so many hidden people did not? I can’t make people and places and