The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [58]
The book is bound in very soft white suede, sunned and worn away on the spine. The cover bears the dates 1878 and 1903. It is closed with a yellow silk ribbon, which we untie.
Inside are twelve beautiful pen-and-ink images of members of the family on separate cards, each edged with silver, each with its own carefully designed frame in Secessionist patterns, each with a cryptic quatrain in German or Latin or English, part of a poem or a snatch of a song. We work out that it must be a present for Baron Paul and Evelina’s silver wedding anniversary from Emmy and her brother Pips. White suede for their mother who was always so particular about white: hats, gowns, pearls and white suede boots.
One of the silver anniversary pen-and-ink cards is of Pips in uniform playing Schubert at the piano: he has received the education that Emmy never had, with proper tutors. He has a wide circle of friends in the arts and the theatre, is a man around town in several capitals and is as impeccably dressed as his sister. A childhood memory of my great-uncle Iggie’s was seeing into Pips’s dressing-room at a hotel in Biarritz where they all spent a summer. The door of the wardrobe was open, and hanging on a rail were eight identical suits. They were all white: an epiphany, a vision of heaven.
Pips playing the piano. An image from Joseph Olbrich’s Secessionist album, 1903
Pips appears as the protagonist of a highly successful novel of the time by the German Jewish novelist Jakob Wassermann, a sort of Mitteleuropa version of Buchan’s Richard Hannay in The Thirty-Nine Steps. Our aesthetic hero is a pal of archdukes and manages to outshoot anarchists. He is erudite about incunabula and Renaissance art, rescues rare jewels and is loved by everyone. The book is viscous with infatuation.
Another pen-and-ink sketch in this album shows Emmy dancing at a ball, leaning back as a slim young man leads her round the floor. A cousin, I presume, as this willowy dancer is most certainly not Viktor. One drawing shows Paul Schey almost obscured by Die Neue Freie Presse, an owl sitting in deep reserve behind him on his chair. Evelina skating. A pair of legs in striped bathing shorts disappearing into the swimming lake at Kövesces. Each picture also contains a little image of a bottle of eau-de-vie or wine or schnapps and a few bars of music.
The cards are the work of Josef Olbrich. He was the artist at the heart of the radical Secession movement and designer of its Pavilion in Vienna with an owl relief and a golden dome of laurel leaves, a quiet, elegant place of refuge with walls that he described as ‘white and gleaming, holy and chaste’. Since we are in Vienna where everything is subject to intense scrutiny, it also receives vitriol. It is the Grave of the Mahdi, say the wags, The Crematorium. That filigree dome is ‘a head of cabbage’. I give Olbrich’s album suitable scrutiny, but it is a lost acrostic puzzle, utterly unknowable. Why the eau-devie, why that piece of music? It is very Viennese, an urbane view of their country life in Kövesces. It is a window into Emmy’s world, a whole warm world of family jokes.
How could you possibly not know you had this? I ask my father. What else have you got in the suitcase under your bed?
16. ‘LIBERTY HALL’
I feel confident that there will be less to puzzle over in Emmy von Ephrussi’s married life in Vienna. This is city life with a very different kind of family and with its own unshakeable rhythm, just ten minutes’ walk away from her childhood home in the other Palais.
The new rhythm started soon after the return from honeymoon, when Emmy discovered she was pregnant. Elisabeth, my grandmother, was born nine months after the wedding. Viktor’s mother Emilie – in my portrait, suave and implacable in her pearls – died in Vichy soon after, at the age of sixty-four. She was buried in Vichy, rather than returning to Ignace’s great mausoleum, and I wonder if she planned this final separation.
After Elisabeth comes Gisela, born three years later, and Ignace – young