The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [69]
to keep them from being exposed to dust by putting them into glass cases with glass edges. Dust fills up the holes, makes the raised work coarse, kills the gloss and takes away from the carving a great deal of the charm. When Netsukes are placed together with curios, trinkets and other objects on the mantel pieces, there is a danger of their being broken by careless domestics, swept away, or even carried to an unknown destination in the folds of a woman’s dress upon the occasion of a friendly visit. One of my Netsukes one evening made such a trip unbeknown to the lady who carried it through the streets until she finally discovered it and returned it to me.
The netsuke could not feel safer than they are here. Careless domestics do not last long in Emmy’s Palais: she snaps at the girl who spills the cream jug on the tray. A broken Harlequin in the salon means dismissal. In her dressing-room one of the other servants dusts the furniture, but only Anna is allowed to open the vitrine for the children, before she lays out her mistress’s clothes for the evening.
The netsuke are no longer part of salon life, no longer part of a game of sharpened wit. No one is going to comment on the quality of their carving or the pallor of their patina. They have lost any connection to Japan, lost their Japonisme, are suspended from critique. They have become true toys, true bibelots: they are not so small when they are picked up by a child. Here, in this dressing-room, they are part of the intimacy of Emmy’s life. This is the space where she undresses with the help of Anna, and dresses for the next engagement with Viktor, a friend, a lover. It has its own kind of threshold.
The longer Emmy lives with the netsuke and sees her children playing with them, the more she realises that they are too intimate a gift to have on display. Her closest friend, Marianne Gutmann, has a few of these netsuke – eleven, to be exact – but only in her country house. They have laughed about them together. But how could you explain the sheer number of these unconventional and rather overwhelming foreign carvings to the ladies from the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde committee, the IKG – all wearing a small dark ribbon on their dress – who gather to help Galician girls from the shtetls get honest jobs. It would be impossible.
It is April again and I am back in the Palais. I look out of the window of Emmy’s dressing-room through the bare branches of the lindens, past the Votivkirche, along Währinger Strasse, and it is the fifth turning to Dr Freud’s house at Berggasse 19, where he is writing up the notes on Emmy’s late great-aunt Anna von Lieben as the case of Cacilie M., a woman with a ‘hysterical psychosis of denial’, severe facial pains and memory lapses, sent to him ‘because no one knew what do with her’. For five years she had been in his care, talking so much that he had to persuade her to start writing: she was his Lehrmeisterin, his professor in the study of hysteria.
There are all the cases and cases of antiquities behind his back, as he writes. Rosewood and mahogany and Biedermeier vitrines with wooden shelves and glass shelves, with Etruscan mirrors and Egyptian scarabs and mummy portraits and Roman death-masks, wreathed in cigar smoke. I realise at this point that I am beginning to obsess hopelessly about what is fast becoming my very special subject, the vitrines of the fin de siècle. On Freud’s desk is a netsuke in the form of a shishi, a lion.
My time-management skills are seriously awry. I spent a week reading Adolf Loos on Japanese style as the ‘abandonment of symmetry’, and how it flattens