The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [135]
He tells me politely that Gorky collected netsuke. We drink more coffee. I have brought the envelope of documents that I found in Iggie’s flat in Tokyo between the old copies of Architectural Digest. Sasha is appalled that I’ve brought the originals, and not copies, but as I watch him he is like a pianist, playing with the different papers.
There are records of the fearsome Ignace, the builder of the Palais, as Consul in Odessa for the Swedish and Norwegian crown, an im perial notification from the Tsar that he is allowed to wear a Bessarabian medal, papers from the Rabbinate. This is the old paper, Sasha says, they changed this in 1870; that is the stamp, that is the fee. Here is the signature of the governor, always so emphatic – look, it has almost gone through the paper. Look at the address of this one, the corner of X and Y! It is very Odessan. This is a clerk’s copy, poor writing.
As Sasha handles the desiccated records and they flicker into life, I look at the envelope for the first time. It is addressed in Viktor’s handwriting, sent out from Kövesces to Elisabeth in September 1938. This bundle of documents meant something to Viktor and to Iggie. It was the family archive. I place them carefully back.
On the way back to the hotel we duck into a synagogue. The Odessan Jews are so worldly, it was said, that they stubbed out their cigarettes on its walls. There is a circle of hell put aside just for them. It is busy in here today. There is a school run by young men from Tel Aviv in progress. They are restoring part of the building, and one of the students comes over to greet us in English. We look in, not wanting to disturb them, and there up on the left neat to the front, is the yellow armchair. It is a Seder chair, the chair for the elect, the special chair set apart.
Charles’s yellow armchair was invisible in plain sight. It was so obvious that it disappeared when placed among the Degas and the Moreaus and the cabinet of netsuke in his Parisian salon. It is a pun, a Jewish joke.
As I stand in front of the museum with its statue of a wrestling Laocoön, the one that Charles drew for Viktor, I realise how wrong I’ve been. I thought the boys left Odessa to get their education in Vienna and in Paris. I thought that Charles went off on his Grand Tour in order to broaden his horizons, to get away from the provinces and learn about the Classics. But this whole city is a classical world balancing above the port. Here, a hundred yards from their house on the boulevard, was a museum that held rooms and rooms of antiquities, the Greek artefacts that were dug up as the town became a city, doubling in size every decade. Of course Odessa had scholars and collectors. Just because Odessa was a dusty city, with its stevedores and sailors, stokers, fishermen, divers, smugglers, adventurers, swindlers, and their grandfather Joachim, the great chancer in his Palais, did not mean that it was not full of writers and artists too.
Does it start here on the edge of the sea? Perhaps that up-and-off entrepreneurial spirit is Odessan; their vagabonding after old books or Dürer or adventures in love or the next good grain deal. Odessa is certainly a good place to ship out from. You can turn east or you can turn west. It is wry, avid, polyglot.
It is a good place to change your name. ‘Jewish names are unpleasant to the ear’: this is where their grandmother Balbina became Belle, and where their grandfather Chaim became Joachim, and then Charles Joachim. This is where Eizak became Ignace and where Leib became Leon. And Efrussi became Ephrussi. This is where the memory of Berdichev, the shtetl in the eastern Ukraine on the edge of Poland where Chaim came from, was walled up behind the