The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [67]
Together, they would take down the heavy picture books with their rich maroon covers: Edmund Dulac’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, Sleeping Beauty and, best of all, Beauty and the Beast with its figures of horror. Each Christmas brought the new Fairy Book of Andrew Lang, ordered from London by the children’s English grandmother: Grey, Violet, Crimson, Brown, Orange, Olive and Rose. A book could last a year. Each child would choose a favourite story:
Gisela and Elisabeth, 1906
‘The White Wolf’, ‘The Queen of the Flowery Isles’, ‘The Boy Who Found Fear at Last’, ‘What Came of Picking Flowers’, ‘The Limping Fox’, ‘The Street Musician’.
Read aloud, a story from the Fairy Books is less than half an hour long. Each story starts with ‘Once upon a time’. Some stories have a cottage on the edge of the forest, like the birch and pine forests at Kövesces. Some of the stories include the white wolf, like the one shot by the gamekeeper near the house, and shown to the children and their cousins on an early autumn morning in the stable yard. Or the bronze wolf’s head on the door of the Palais Schey, whose muzzle gets rubbed every time they pass it.
There are strange meetings in these stories, encounters with the bird-charmer with a flock of finches on his hat and arms – like the one you see standing in a circle of children on the Ringstrasse outside the gates of the Volksgarten. Or with pedlars. Like the Schnorrer with his basket of buttons and pencils and postcards hanging from his black coat, who stands by the gates out onto Franzenring and to whom they have been told by their father they must be polite.
Lots of stories include the Princess getting dressed in her gown and tiara to go to the ball, like Mama. Lots of stories have a magic palace in them with a ballroom, like the room downstairs that you see lit with candles at Christmas. All the stories finish with ‘The End’ and a kiss from Mama, and then no more stories for another whole week. Emmy was a wonderful story-teller, said Iggie.
The other time that the children regularly see her is when she is dressing to go out and they are allowed into her dressing-room.
Emmy would change out of her day-clothes, in which she had received or visited friends, into her clothes for dinner at home or, the opera, or a party or, best of all, a ball. Dresses would be laid out over the chaise longue and there would be a lengthy discussion with the expert Anna over which one to wear. The eyes of my great-uncle Iggie used to fire as he described her animation. If Viktor had Ovid and Tacitus – and his Leda – at one end of the corridor, then at the other end Emmy could describe dresses that her mother had worn season by season, how lengths were changing, how the weight and fall of a gown altered the way you moved, the differences between a muslin, gauze or tulle scarf across your shoulders in the evening. She knows about Paris fashion and what is à la mode in Vienna, and how to play the two. She is especially good on hats: a velvet hat with a huge ribbon on it to meet the Emperor; a fur toque with an ostrich feather, worn with a column dress trimmed in black fur; the best hat in the line of Jewish ladies at a charity do in a small ballroom somewhere. Something very wide indeed with a hydrangea on its brim. From Kövesces, Emmy sends to her mother a postcard of herself wearing a dark Makart hat: ‘Tascha shot a buck today. How is your cold? Do you like my newest affected pictures?’
Dressing is the hour when Anna brushes her hair and laces corsets, fastens innumerable