The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [116]
The Ephrussi legatees received 50,000 schillings on agreeing to a renunciation of any further claim. It was the equivalent of about $5,000 at the time.
I find all this stuff about restitution exhausting. I can see how you could spend your life tracking something down, your energy sapping away with all these rules and letters and legalities. You know that on someone else’s mantelpiece is chiming the clock from the salon, with the mermaids twined liquidly around its base. You open a sales catalogue and see two ships in a gale, and suddenly you are standing by the door to the stairs with nanny wrapping a muffler around your neck ready for your walk along the Ring. For one held breath you can piece together a life, a broken setting for a diasporic family.
It was a family that could not put itself back together. Elisabeth provided a kind of centre in Tunbridge Wells, writing and relating news, sending on photographs of nieces and nephews. After the war Henk started a good job in London working for the UN relief association and they were more comfortably off. Gisela was in Mexico. She had lean times and worked as a cleaner to support the family. Rudolf was demobbed and living in Virginia. And fashion had ‘given up’ on Iggie – as he put it. He could not face working on gowns again: the thread from Vienna to Paris to New York had been broken by his battle experiences in 1944 in France.
He was now working for Bunge, an international grain exporter, an unintentional return to the patriarch’s roots in Odessa. His first assignment had been a long year in Léopoldville in the Belgian Congo, hated for both its heat and its brutality.
In October 1947 Iggie visited England between postings. He had been offered placements back in the Congo or in Japan, neither of which appealed. He travelled to Tunbridge Wells to see Elisabeth and Henk and his nephews, and to visit his father’s grave for the first time. Then he planned to make a decision about his future.
It was after supper. The boys had done their homework and were in bed. Elisabeth opened the attaché case and showed him the netsuke.
A melee of rats. The fox with inlaid eyes. The monkey wrapped around the gourd. His brindled wolf. They take a few out and put them on the kitchen table of the suburban house.
We didn’t say anything, Iggie told me. We had last looked at them together in our mother’s dressing-room, thirty years before, sitting on the yellow carpet.
It’s Japan, he said. I’ll take them back.
Part Four
TOKYO 1947–1991
30. TAKENOKO
On 1st December 1947 Iggie received Military Permit no. 4351 for entry to Japan G1 GHQ FEC, Tokyo. Six days later he arrived in the occupied city.
Coming in from Haneda airport, the taxi swerved around the worst of the potholes in the roads, swerved to avoid the children, the bicyclists and the women in their baggy patterned trousers trudging towards the city. Tokyo was a strange landscape. The first thing to notice were the looping calligraphies of telephone wires and power cables stretching in every featureless direction over the red of the rusted iron roofing on the shacks. Then, in the winter light, Mount Fuji rose up in the south-west.
The Americans had bombed Tokyo for three years, but the raids of 10th March 1945 were cataclysmic. There were walls of flame from the incendiary bombs, ‘sowing the sky with fire’: 100,000 people were killed and sixteen square miles of the city were destroyed.
All but a handful of buildings were flattened or incinerated. Those that survived included the Imperial Palace behind its grey ramparts of boulders and its wide moats, the few built from stone or concrete, the odd kura, the storehouse in which merchant families kept their treasures, and the Imperial Hotel. This had been designed