The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [3]
And one afternoon a week I spent with my great-uncle Iggie.
I’d walk up the hill from the subway station, past the glowing beer-dispensing machines, past Senkaku-ji temple where the forty-seven samurai are buried, past the strange baroque meeting hall for a Shinto sect, past the sushi bar run by the bluff Mr X, turning right at the high wall of Prince Takamatsu’s garden with the pines. I’d let myself in and take the lift up to the sixth floor. Iggie would be reading in his armchair by the window. Mostly Elmore Leonard or John Le Carré. Or memoirs in French. It is odd, he said, how some languages are warmer than others. I would bend down and he’d give me a kiss.
His desk held an empty blotter, a sheaf of his headed paper, and pens ready, though he no longer wrote. The view from the window behind him was of cranes. Tokyo Bay was disappearing behind forty-storey condominiums.
We’d have lunch together, prepared by his housekeeper Mrs Nakano or left by his friend Jiro, who lived in the interconnecting apartment. An omelette and salad, and toasted bread from one of the excellent French bakeries in the department stores in the Ginza. A glass of cold white wine, Sancerre or Pouilly Fumé. A peach. Some cheese and then very good coffee. Black coffee.
Iggie was eighty-four and slightly stooped. He was always impeccably dressed; handsome in his herringbone jackets with a handkerchief in the pocket, his pale shirts and a cravat. He had a small white moustache.
After our lunch he’d open the sliding doors of the long vitrine that took up most of one wall of the sitting-room and would get out the netsuke one by one. The hare with amber eyes. The young boy with the samurai sword and helmet. A tiger, all shoulder and feet, turning round to snarl. He would pass me one and we’d look at it together, and then I’d put it carefully back amongst the dozens of animals and figures on the glass shelves.
Iggie with the netsuke collection in Tokyo, 1960
I’d fill the little cups of water kept in the case to make sure the ivories didn’t split in the dry air.
Did I tell you, he would say, how much we loved these as children? How they were given to my mother and father by a cousin in Paris? And did I tell you the story of Anna’s pocket?
Conversations could take strange turns. One moment he would be describing how their cook in Vienna would make their father Kaiserschmarrm for his birthday breakfast, layers of pancakes and icing sugar bathed in a syrupy liqueur; how it would be brought in with a great flourish by the butler Josef into the dining-room and cut with a long knife, and how Papa would always say that the Emperor couldn’t hope for a better start to his own birthday. And the next moment he would be talking about Lilli’s second marriage. Who was Lilli?
Thank God, I’d think, that even if I didn’t know about Lilli I knew enough to know where some of the stories were set: Bad Ischl, Kövesces, Vienna. I’d think, as the construction lights on the cranes came on at dusk, stretching deeper and deeper into Tokyo Bay, that I was becoming a sort of amanuensis and that I should probably record what he said about Vienna before the First World War, sit at his elbow with a notebook. I never did. It seemed formal and inappropriate. It also seemed greedy: that’s a good rich story, I’ll have that. Anyway, I liked the way that repetition wears things smooth, and there was something of the river stone to Iggie’s stories.
Over the year of afternoons I’d hear about their father’s pride in the cleverness of his older sister Elisabeth, and of Mama’s dislike of her elaborate language. Do talk sensibly! He often mentioned, with some anxiety, a game with his sister Gisela, where they had to take something small from the drawing-room, get it down the stairs and across the courtyard, dodge the grooms, go down the cellar steps and hide it in the arched vaults under the house. And dare each other to get it back, and how he lost something in the dark. It seemed an unfinished, fraying memory.
Lots of stories about Kövesces, their country