The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [133]
Each view is calibrated. There are landmarks to walk between: the Pushkin statue commemorating his stay here, a cannon captured from the British during the Crimean War. This is where the evening passeggiata would take place, ‘the twilight walking to and fro, gossiping and even . . . liberal amounts of flirting’. Higher up is the Opera House modelled on Vienna, where Jewish and Greek factions supporting this season’s new Italian singers would take their name – the ‘Montechellisti’, ‘the Carraristi’ – and fight. This is not a city around a cathedral or a fortress. It is a Hellenic city of merchants and poets, and this is its bourgeois agora.
In a junk shop in an arcade I buy some Soviet medals for my kids and a couple of nineteenth-century postcards. In one it is high summer, perhaps July, late in the century. It is the middle of the day, as the shadows of the chestnut trees are short. The Promenade was ‘cool even at noon in the heat of midsummer’, said an Odessan poet. A woman with a parasol moves down the Promenade away from the Pushkin statue, while a nanny pushes an enormous black perambulator. You can just see the dome of the funicular railway that carries people up and down to the port. Beyond that there is a line of the masts of ships in the bay.
Postcard of the promenade in Odessa in 1880. The bank and Ephrussi mansion are the second and third buildings on the left
Turn left at the top of the steps and you look all the way down to the Stock Exchange, a Corinthian villa in which to conduct your business. It is now the Hôtel de Ville and a banner welcomes a Belgian delegation. It is early November and so mild that we walk down the street in our shirt-sleeves. We pass some mansions, then the Hôtel, and three buildings down is the Ephrussi bank, with the family house next door. This is where Jules and Ignace and Charles were born. It is where Viktor was born. We go round the back.
It is a mess. The stucco is coming off in great gouts, the balconies are shedding, there is a bit of slippage amongst the putti. When I come up close I see it has been refaced too, replastered, and those are certainly not original windows. But right at the top is a single balcony in which the double E of the family hangs on.
I hesitate. Thomas, who is good at this, fearless, walks through the broken gates under the arch into the yard behind the Ephrussi house. Here are the stable blocks with their floors of dark stone. It is ballast, he says over his shoulder, lava from Sicily brought in on the grain ships. Grain out. Lava back. A dozen men, suddenly silent, drinking tea, a Citroën 2CV up on blocks. There is a chained Alsatian barking. The yard is full of dust. It has three skips full of timber and plaster and broken stone. He finds the foreman in a shiny leather jacket. Yes, you can go in – you’re lucky, it is just being renovated, new everything, beautifully done, a real success, on schedule, a quality job. We have just put laboratories into the basement, fire doors and a sprinkler system. It is the offices next. We had to get rid of all of the old house, it was shot, hopeless. You should have seen it a month ago!
I should have. I am too late. What can I touch here in this stripped-out hulk? It has no ceilings, only steel girders and electric cabling. It has no floors, only concrete screed. The walls have just been plastered, the windows have been reglazed. Some ironwork is up for partitions. They have taken out all the doors, except for one in oak, destined for the skips tomorrow. The only thing left is the volume, the scale of these rooms, sixteen feet high.
There is nothing here.
Thomas and the shiny man are racing ahead, talking Russian. ‘This house was the headquarters of the steamship company since the Revolution. Before that? God knows! Now? The headquarters of the Marine Hygiene Inspection Office. That’s why we’ve put in the laboratories.’ They