The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [136]
This is where they became the Ephrussi from Odessa.
This is a good place to put something in your pocket and start a journey. I want to go to see what the sky looks like in Berdichev, but I have to go home. From the chestnut trees outside the house I look out for a conker to put in my pocket. I walk the whole promenade twice, but I am a month too late with this as well. They have gone. I hope some children have picked them up.
37. YELLOW/GOLD/RED
As I fly home from Odessa I feel exhausted by the whole year. I correct myself. It is not a single year, it has become close to two years of looking at the scribbles in the margins of books, the letters used as bookmarks, the photographs of nineteenth-century cousins, the Odessan patents of this and that, the envelopes at the backs of drawers with their few sad aerogrammes. Two years of tracing routes across cities, an old map in one hand, lost.
My fingers are tacky from old papers and from dust. My father keeps finding things. How can he keep finding things in his tiny flat in his courtyard of retired clergymen? He has just found a diary in unreadable German from the 1870s that I need to get translated. A week goes by in an archive and all I have is a list of unread newspapers, a note to look up some correspondence, a question mark about Berlin. My studio is full of novels and books on Japonisme, and I miss my children and I haven’t made any porcelain for months and months. I’m anxious about what I’ll make when I finally sit down at my wheel with a lump of clay.
A few days in Odessa and now there are more questions than before. Where did Gorky buy his netsuke? What was the library like in Odessa in the 1870s? Berdichev was destroyed in the war, but perhaps I should go there too and see what it looks like. Conrad came from Berdichev: perhaps I should read Conrad. Did he write about dust?
My tiger netsuke comes from Tamba, a village in the mountains west of Kyoto. I remember an endless bus journey thirty years ago to visit an old potter on a dusty street straggling up a hillside. Perhaps I should trace my tiger home. There must be a cultural history of dust.
My notebook is made up of lists of lists. Yellow / Gold / Red / Yellow armchair / Yellow cover Gazette / Yellow Palais / Golden lacquer box / Titian gold Louise’s hair / Renoir: La Bohémienne / Vermeer’s View of Delft.
My competent brother is home already. In Prague airport, where I change planes and have three hours to kill, I sit with my notebooks and a bottle of beer, and then another, and worry about Berdichev. I remember that Charles, that graceful dancer, was called Le Polonais, the Pole, both by his brother Ignace and by the dandy Robert de Montesquieu, a great friend of Proust’s. And that Painter, the early biographer of Proust, picked this up and made Charles barbarous and uncouth. I thought he had simply got it wrong. Perhaps, I think over my beer, he was making a point about where you start from: Poland, not Russia. I realise that in all my enthusiasm about tactile responses to Odessa I have mislaid its reputation as a city of pogroms, a city you might wish to leave behind.
And I have the slightly clammy feeling of biography, the sense of living on the edges of other people’s lives without their permission. Let it go. Let it lie. Stop looking and stop picking things up, the voice says insistently. Just go home and leave these stories be.
But leaving be is hard. I remember the hesitancies when talking to Iggie in old age; hesitancies that trembled into silences, silences that marked places of loss. I remember Charles in his final illness, and the death of Swann and the opening of his heart like a vitrine, his taking out one memory after another. ‘Even when one is no longer attached to things, it’s still something to have been attached to them; because it was always for reasons which other people didn’t grasp . . .’ There are the places in memory you do not wish to go with others. In the 1960s, my grandmother Elisabeth, so assiduous in her