The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [129]
Iggie had turned himself into a businessman, becoming the kind of man, he said once, poignantly, that his father would recognise. Partly because I don’t understand money, I see him in a similar way to Viktor, the great man of business hiding slightly behind his desk, a book of poetry surreptitiously hidden amongst the ledgers, looking forward to his release of the end of the day. In fact, unlike his father, who had presided over a spectacular series of downfalls, Iggie proved to be good with money. ‘Suffice it to say,’ he types in a copy of a 1964 Private & Confidential letter to the General Manager of Swiss Bank Corp, Zurich – used as a bookmark in his copy of Our Man In Havana – ‘that I started in Japan from scratch and have been able over the years to build up an organisation with a yearly turnover of over 100 million yen. We maintain two offices in Japan, in Tokyo and Osaka, employing some 45 people and I am Vice President and Japan manager . . .’ 100 million yen was a fair amount.
Iggie became a banker after all, a hundred years after his grandfather Ignace opened the bank in Vienna off the Schottengasse. He became the representative of Swiss Bank in Tokyo – the ne plus ultra of banks, he explained to me. He acquired a bigger office – this one with a secretary behind a desk in the reception area, with an ikebana arrangement of a pine branch and iris. From the sixth-floor windows he could look west across the blocky new landscape of cranes and aerials of Tokyo, and east to the pines of the Imperial Palace and down to the streams of yellow taxis below in Otemachi. He was growing into himself, too. In 1964 he was fifty-eight, with a firmly knotted tie under a dark-grey suit, a hand in a pocket as in his Viennese graduation photograph. His hair was receding, but Iggie knew enough about himself to avoid a comb-over.
Jiro, a handsome thirty-eight, had a new career working for CBS negotiating to bring American TV programmes into Japan. ‘And,’ said Jiro, ‘I was responsible for bringing the Viennese concert for New Year to Japan for NHK. No one wanted it! The wild reaction! You know the adoration of Japanese for Viennese music, for Strauss? They asked Iggie in the taxi “Where are you from?” He’d reply “Wien, Austria” and then they start la-la-la-ing the Blue Danube Waltz.’
In 1970 the couple bought some land on the Ito peninsula, seventy miles south of Tokyo, enough space for a cottage. In a photograph there is a veranda for evening drinks. The ground falls away in front of you and, framed by bamboos, there is a glimpse of sea.
And they bought a plot for a grave in the grounds of the temple where one of their closest friends had his family tomb. Iggie was here to stay.
And then in 1972 they moved to Takanawa, to apartments in a new building in a good location. ‘Higashi-Ginza, Shimbashi, Daimon, Mita’ sings the voice on the subway, and then ‘Senkakuji’, and you alight and walk up the hill to home, on this quiet street next to the walls of the palace of Prince Takamatsu. Tokyo can be very quiet. I once sat waiting for them to come home, sitting on the low green railing opposite, and in an hour only two old ladies came past and a hopeful yellow taxi.
They were not large apartments, but very convenient: they were thinking ahead. Separate front doors, but adjoining, with a door from one dressing-room to another. Iggie put one mirrored wall in his hall and lined