The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [132]
We talk through the journeys I’ve been on in search of the history of the netsuke, all the vagabonding. We look at the photographs I’ve taken in Paris and Vienna and I show him a clipping from last week’s newspaper. A pink and gold Fabergé egg that opens to reveal a diamond-studded cockerel – commissioned by Iggie’s great-aunt Beatrice Ephrussi-Rothschild – has just become the most expensive Russian object ever auctioned. And because we are in Iggie’s old apartment, Jiro opens up the vitrine once again and reaches in to pick up a netsuke.
And then he suggests that we go out tonight. There is a new restaurant he has heard good things of, and we could see a film.
36. AN ASTROLABE, A MENZULA, A GLOBE
It is November and I need to go to Odessa. It is nearly two years since I began this journey and I’ve been everywhere else but the city where the Ephrussi family started. I want to see the Black Sea and imagine the grain warehouses on the edge of the seaport. And perhaps, if I stand in the house where Charles and my great-grandfather Viktor were born, I will understand. I am not sure what I will understand. Why they left? What it means to leave? I think I’m looking for a beginning.
I meet Thomas, my youngest brother, and the tallest, who has travelled from Moldova by taxi. He is an expert on conflict in the Caucasus. It is a journey that has taken him five hours. Thomas, who is writing on Odessa and speaks Russian, is blasé about borders. He has been held up, laughs that it’s always a problem whether to bribe or not. I worry about visas: he doesn’t. We haven’t been on a trip together for twenty-five years, since we were students and went off around the Greek islands. He speaks Greek, too. He was pretty competent then, I remember suddenly. Andrei, the Moldovan taxi driver, sets off.
We bump along the outskirts of ravaged apartment blocks and decaying factories, overtaken by huge black 4x4s with tinted windows and by old Fiats, until we meet the wide avenues of old Odessa. No one told me, I tell Thomas petulantly, that it was so beautiful, that there were catalpa trees alongside the pavements, that there were courtyards glimpsed through open doors, shallow oak steps, that there were balconies. Some of Odessa is being restored, plasterwork repaired and stucco repainted, while other buildings sink in Piranesian squalor with looping cables, sagging roofs, gates off their hinges and missing capitals to the pillars.
We come to a full stop outside the Hotel Londonskya, a Belle Epoque palazzo of gilt and marble on the Primorsky Boulevard. Queen is playing softly in the foyer. The Boulevard is a great promenade, a run of classical buildings washed in yellows and pale blues. It stretches an either side of the Potemkin Steps, made famous in Eisenstein’s film The Battleship Potemkin. There are 192 steps with ten landings, designed so that when you look down you see only landings, and when you look up you see only steps.
Climb these steps slowly. When you reach the top, avoid the predatory hawkers of Soviet navy hats, the begging sailor with the poem round his neck, and the man dressed as Peter the Great who wants you to pay for a photograph with him. To the front is the statue of the Duc de Richelieu, the early nineteenth-century governor of the region brought in from France to plan the city, in his toga. Walk past him and on through the curved arcs of golden buildings, two perfect parentheses, and you reach Catherine the Great surrounded by her favourites. For fifty years there was a Soviet statue here, but now Catherine is being restored to her old position, courtesy of a local oligarch. Granite setts are being laid around her feet.
Turn right at the top of the steps