The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [138]
You take an object from your pocket and put it down in front of you and you start. You begin to tell a story.
When I hold them I find myself looking for the wear, the fine cracks that run alongside the grain of some of the ivories. It is not just that I want the split in these wrestlers – a tangle of hopelessly thrashing ivory limbs – to have come from being been dropped onto Charles’s golden carpet of the winds by someone famous (a poet, a painter, Proust) in a moment of grand fin-de-siècle excitement. Or that the deeply ingrained dust lodged under the wings of a cicada resting on a walnut shell comes from being hidden in a Viennese mattress. It probably doesn’t.
The collection’s latest resting-place is in London. The Victoria and Albert Museum is getting rid of some of its old vitrines to make way for new displays. I buy one.
Because my work as a potter is seen as minimalist – rows of pale celadon blue-grey porcelain vessels – it is assumed that my wife and our three children live in some temple to minimalism, with a concrete floor perhaps, or a wall of glass, some Danish furniture. We don’t. We live in an Edwardian house in a pleasant London street with plane trees out the front, and a hall that contained – this morning – a cello and a French horn, some wellington boots, a wooden fort that the boys have outgrown and that has been on its way to a charity shop for three months, a heap of coats and shoes, and Ella, our aged, loved gun-dog – beyond the hall it gets messy. But I want our three kids to have the chance to get to know the netsuke as those children did a hundred years ago.
So, with great effort, we haul in this decommissioned vitrine. It takes four of us and a lot of swearing. It is seven feet high on its mahogany base and is made of bronze. It has three glass shelves. It is only as it is being fixed to the wall that I remember my own childhood collections. I collected bones, a mouse skin, shells, a tiger’s claw, the sloughed scales of a snake, clay pipes and oyster shells, and Victorian pennies from the archaeological dig that my elder brother John and I started one summer in Lincoln, forty years ago, marking out the ground with string into a grid before getting bored. My father was Chancellor of the Cathedral and we lived opposite its great Gothic east window in the Chancery, a medieval house with a spiral staircase and a chapel at the very end of a long corridor. An archdeacon in the Close passed on his collection of fossils dug up during an Edwardian childhood in Norfolk, some still marked with the day and place they were found. When I was seven the cathedral library was getting rid of mahogany cases, and so half my room was taken over by a vitrine – my first – in which I would arrange and rearrange my objects, turn the key and open up the case on request. It was my Wunderkammer, my world of things, my secret history of touch.
This latest vitrine I think will be a good place for the netsuke. It is next to the piano, and unlocked so that the children can open the door if they wish to.
I put some of the netsuke out on display – the wolf, the medlar, the hare with amber eyes, a dozen more – and when I next look they have been moved around. A rat, curled up asleep, has been pushed to the front. I open the glass door and pick it up. I slip it into my pocket, put the dog on the lead and leave for work. I have pots to make.
The netsuke begin again.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book has been long in its gestation. I first told this story in 2005 and thank you to the three people, Michael Goldfarb, Joe Earle and Christopher Benfey, who told me to stop talking and start writing.
Firstly, I want to thank my brother Thomas for his great encouragement, his practical help and his companionship. My uncle and aunt Constant and Julia de Waal have been very supportive throughout. Thank you to all those who have helped