The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [57]
Emmy knows how to listen with a particular animation, sensing when to ask a question, when to laugh, when to turn away with the tilt of her head to another guest and leave her interlocutor looking at the nape of her neck. She has a lot of admirers, some of whom have experienced her sudden squalls. Emmy has a considerable temper.
For this life in Vienna she needs to know how to dress. Her mother, Evelina, only eighteen years older, also dresses impeccably and wears only white. White all year round: from her hats to the boots that she changes three times a day in the dusty summer. Clothes are a passion that her parents have indulged her in, partly because Emmy has an aptitude for them. Aptitude is too flat a description. It is more driven, more vocational, this way she has of changing one part of what she is wearing to make herself look different from other girls.
There was a lot of dressing up in Emmy’s youth. I found an album from a weekend party where the girls had been photographed dressed up as characters from Old Master paintings. Emmy is Titian’s Isabella d’Este in velvet and fur, while other cousins are pretty Chardin and Pieter de Hooch servant-girls. I make a note of Emmy’s social dominance. Another photograph shows the handsome young Hofmannsthal and the teenage Emmy dressed up as Renaissance Venetians at a wedding masque. There was also a party where they all dressed up as characters from a Hans Makart painting, the perfect opportunity for wide-brimmed hats with feathers.
Before and after marriage Emmy’s other life is in Czechoslovakia, at the Schey country house in Kövesces, two hours by train from Vienna. Kövesces was a very large and very plain eighteenth-century house (‘a large square box such as children draw’, in the words of my grandmother) set in a flat landscape of fields, with belts of willows, birch forests and streams. A great river, the Vah, swept past, forming one of the boundaries to the estate. It was a landscape in which you could see storms passing far away and never even hear them. There was a swimming lake with fretted Moorish changing huts, lots of stables and lots of dogs. Emmy’s mother Evelina bred Gordon setters – the first bitch arriving in a slatted crate on the Orient-Express, the great train stopping at the tiny halt on the estate. And there were her father’s German pointers for the shooting – hares and partridge. Her mother enjoyed shooting and, as the time of a confinement grew nearer, used to go out on the partridge shoots with her midwife following her as well as the gamekeeper.
In Kövesces, Emmy rides. She stalks deer and shoots and walks with the dogs. As I struggle to bring the two parts of her life together, I am also slightly aghast. My picture of Jewish life in fin-de-siècle Vienna is perfectly burnished, mostly consisting of Freud and vignettes of acerbic and intellectual talk in the cafés. I’m rather in love with my ‘Vienna as crucible of the twentieth century’ motif, as are many curators and academics. Now I am in the Vienna part of the story, I am listening to Mahler and reading my Schnitzler and Loos, and feeling very Jewish myself.
My image of the period certainly doesn’t stretch to include Jewish deer-stalking or Jewish discussion of the merits of different gun-dogs for different game. I am at sea, when my father rings me up to tell me that he has found something else to add to the growing file of photographs. I can tell that he is rather pleased with himself and his own vagabonding on this project. He comes down to my studio for lunch and produces a small white book from a supermarket bag. I’m not sure what it is,