The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [62]
Does assimilation mean that they never came up against naked prejudice? Does it mean that you understood where the limits of your social world were and you stuck to them? There is a Jockey Club in Vienna, as in Paris, and Viktor was a member, but Jews weren’t allowed to hold office. Did this matter to him in the slightest? It was understood that married Gentile women never visited Jewish households, never came to leave a card, never visited on one of the interminable afternoons. Vienna meant that only Gentile bachelors, Count Mensdorf, Count Lubienski, the young Prince Montenuovo, left cards and were then invited. Once married they never came, no matter how good the dinners were, or how pretty the hostess. Did this matter at all? These seem such gossamer threads of rudeness.
I spend my last morning of this visit in the records of the Vienna Jewish community next to the synagogue off Judengasse. There are police nearby. In the latest elections the far right has just won a third of the popular vote, and no one knows if the synagogue is a target. There have been so many threats that I must pass through a complex security system. Finally inside, I watch as the archivist pulls out the folio records, one striped volume after another, and lays them on the lectern. Each birth and marriage and death, each conversion, the whole of Jewish Vienna faithfully recorded.
In 1899 Vienna has its own Jewish orphanages and hospitals, schools and libraries, newspapers and journals. It has twenty-two synagogues. And, I realise, I know nothing about any of them: the Ephrussi family are so perfectly assimilated they have disappeared into Vienna.
17. THE SWEET YOUNG THING
Elisabeth’s memoir is a tonic: twelve unsentimental pages written for her sons in the 1970s. ‘The house I was born in stood, and still stands, outwardly unaltered, on the corner of the Ring . . .’ She gives details of the running of the household, she gives the names of the horses, and she walks me through the rooms in the Palais. Finally, I think, I will find out where Emmy has hidden the netsuke.
If Emmy turns right out of the nursery and goes along the corridor she enters the sides of the courtyard with the kitchens and sculleries, the pantry and the silver-room – where the light burns all day – and then on to the butler’s room and the servants’ hall. At the end of this corridor are all the maids’ rooms, rooms whose windows open only into the courtyard, some yellow light filtering in through the glassed roof, but no fresh air. Her maid Anna’s room is down there somewhere.
When Emmy turns left she is in her drawing-room. She has hung it with pale-green silk brocade. The carpets are a very pale yellow. Her furniture is Louis XV, chairs and fauteuils of inlaid woods with bronze mounts and fat striped silk cushions. There are occasional tables, each with their little set-piece of bibelots, and a larger table on which she could perform the intricacies of making tea. There is a grand piano that is never played and a Renaissance Italian cabinet with folding doors, painted on the inside, and very small drawers that the children aren’t meant to play with, but do. When Elisabeth reached between the tiny gilded twisty columns on either side of an arch and pressed upwards, a tiny secret drawer came out with an exhaled breath.
There is light in these rooms, trembling reflections and glints of silver and porcelain and polished fruitwood, and shadows from the linden trees. In the spring flowers are sent up each week from Kövesces. It is a perfect place to display a vitrine with cousin Charles’ netsuke, but they are not here.
On from the drawing-room is the library, the largest room on this floor of the Palais. It is painted black and red, like Ignace’s great suite of rooms on the floor below, with a black-and-red Turkey carpet and huge ebony bookshelves lining the walls and large tobacco-coloured leather armchairs and sofas. A large brass chandelier hangs