The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [137]
Not ‘Who would be interested?’ But ‘Don’t come near this. This is private.’
In very old age she would not talk of her mother at all. She would talk about politics and French poetry. She did not mention Emmy until she was surprised by a photograph falling out of her prayer book. My father picked it up and she, matter-of-factly, told him that it was one of her mother’s lovers and started to talk about the difficulty of those love-affairs, how compromised she felt by them. And then silence again. There is something about that burning of all those letters that gives me pause: why should everything be made clear and be brought into the light? Why keep things, archive your intimacies? Why not let thirty years of shared conversation go spiralling in ash up into the air of Tunbridge Wells? Just because you have it does not mean you have to pass it on. Losing things can sometimes gain you a space in which to live. I don’t miss Vienna, Elisabeth would say, with a lightness in her voice. It was claustrophobic. It was very dark.
She was over ninety when she mentioned that she had received rabbinical instruction as a child: ‘I asked my father for permission. He was surprised.’ She was matter-of-fact, as if I already knew.
When she died two years later my father, the clergyman in the Church of England, born in Amsterdam with a childhood everywhere in Europe, stood in his Benedictine-black, rabbinical-black cassock and recited the Kaddish for his mother in the parish church near her nursing home.
The problem is that I am in the wrong century to burn things. I am the wrong generation to let it go. I think of a library carefully sorted into boxes. I think of all those careful burnings by others, the systematic erasing of stories, the separations between people and their possessions, and then of people from their families and families from their neighbourhoods. And then from their country.
I think of someone checking a list to make sure that these people were still alive and resident in Vienna, before stamping ‘Sara’ or ‘Israel’ in red over the record of their birth. I think, of course, of all the listings of families in the manifests, for deportations.
If others can be so careful over things that are so important, then I must be careful over these objects and their stories. I must get it right, go back and check it again, walk it again.
‘Don’t you think those netsuke should stay in Japan?’ said a stern neighbour of mine in London. And I find I am shaking as I answer, because this matters.
I tell her that there are plenty of netsuke in the world, sitting in velvet-lined trays in dealers’ cabinets off Bond Street or Madison Avenue, Keizergracht or the Ginza. Then I get a bit side-tracked onto the Silk Road, and then onto Alexander the Great’s coins still being in circulation in the Hindu Kush in the nineteenth century. I tell her about travelling with my partner Sue in Ethiopia, and finding an old Chinese jar covered in dust in a market town and trying to work out how it had got there.
No, I answer. Objects have always been carried, sold, bartered, stolen, retrieved and lost. People have always given gifts. It is how you tell their stories that matters.
It is the counterpart of the question that I am often asked: ‘Don’t you hate to see things leave your studio?’ Well, no, I don’t hate it. I make my living from letting things go. You just hope, if you make things as I do, that they can make their way in the world and have some longevity.
It is not just things that carry stories with them. Stories are a kind of thing, too. Stories and objects share something, a patina. I thought I had this clear, two years ago before I started, but I am no longer sure how this works. Perhaps patina is a process of rubbing back so that the essential is revealed, the way that a striated stone tumbled in a river feels irreducible, the way that this netsuke of a fox has become