The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [61]
Mr Minotti plays the piano each night after dinner. The children play ‘Kim’s game’. Objects – a card case, pince-nez, a shell and once, thrillingly, Pips’s revolver – are placed on a tray and brought in uncovered for thirty seconds. The linen is replaced and you then write down what you can recall. Elisabeth, boringly, wins every single time.
Pips invites his cosmopolitan friends to stay.
December is Vienna and Christmas. Though they are Jewish, they celebrate with lots of presents.
And Emmy’s life seems set, not exactly in stone, but in amber. It seems preserved, the series of period stories, both generic and precious, that I promised myself I would escape from when I set out a year ago. The netsuke seem so far away as I keep circling the Palais.
I extend my stay in Vienna at the Pension Baronesse. They have kindly fixed my glasses, but the world is still slightly askew. I can’t shake off my anxiety. My uncle in London has been searching for information for me and has produced twelve pages of a memoir that my grandmother Elisabeth wrote about growing up in the Palais, and I have brought them to read in situ. It is a sunny morning of breath-catching cold and I take them to the Café Central, with light streaming through the Gothic windows. There is a model of the writer Peter Altenberg holding the menu, and everything is very clean and carefully presented. This was Viktor’s second café, I think, before it all went so wrong.
The café, this street, Vienna itself is a theme park: a fin-de-siècle film-set, glitteringly Secessionist. Fiacres trundling round with coachmen in greatcoats. The waiters have period moustaches. Strauss is everywhere, seeping from the chocolate shops. I keep expecting Mahler to walk in, or Klimt to start an argument. I keep thinking of a dreadful film I saw years ago when I was at university. It was set in Paris, and Picasso kept walking past, and Gertrude Stein and James Joyce were discussing Modernism over their Pernod. This is the problem I’m having here, I realise, assailed by one cliché after another. My Vienna has thinned into other people’s Vienna.
I’ve been reading the seventeen novels of Joseph Roth, the Austrian Jewish novelist, some set in Vienna during the last years of the Hapsburg Empire. It is in the unimpeachable Efrussi Bank – Roth spells it in the Russian manner – that Trotta deposits his wealth in The Radetzky March. Ignace Ephrussi himself is sketched as a rich jeweller in The Spider’s Web: ‘lank and tall, and always [wearing] black, with a high collared coat which just revealed a black silk stock pinned by a pearl the size of a hazelnut’. His wife, the beautiful Frau Efrussi, is ‘a lady: Jewish: but a lady’. Everyone had an easy life, says Theodor, the young and bitter Gentile protagonist, employed by the family as a tutor, ‘the Efrussis the easiest of all . . . Pictures in gold frames hung in the hall and a footman in green and gold livery bowed as he escorted you in.’
The real keeps slipping out of my hands. The lives of my family in Vienna were refracted into books, just like Charles in Proust’s Paris. The dislike of the Ephrussi keeps turning up in novels.
I stumble. I realise that I do not understand what it means to be part of an assimilated, acculturated Jewish family. I simply don’t understand. I know what they didn’t do: they never went to synagogue, but their births and marriages are recorded here by the Rabbinate. I know that they paid their dues to the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde, gave money to Jewish charities. I’ve been to see Joachim and Ignace’s mausoleum in the Jewish section of the cemetery, and worried about its broken cast-iron gate and whether I should pay to get it fixed. Zionism didn’t seem to hold many attractions, for them. I remember those rude comments from Herzl when he wrote to them for donations and got brushed off. The Ephrussi, speculators. I wonder whether it was plain embarrassment at the fervent Jewishness of the enterprise and not wanting to attract attention to themselves. Or whether it was a symptom of their confidence