The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [71]
In the vitrine in Emmy’s dressing-room are the barrel-maker framed by the arc of his half-finished barrel; the street-wrestlers in a sweaty, tumbling embrace of dark chestnut wood; the old, drunk monk with his robes awry; the servant girl cleaning the floor; the rat-catcher with his basket open. When picked out and held, the netsuke are Types of Old Edo, just like the Types of the Old City who walk onto Vienna’s stage every day below the ruled line in Die Neue Freie Presse.
As they sit on their green velvet shelves in Emmy’s dressing-room, these daily feuilletons are doing what Vienna likes to do, telling stories about itself.
And fractious as this beautiful woman in this absurd pink Palais is, she can glance out of her window into the Schottengasse and start a story for her children about the elderly driver of the shabby fiacre, the flower-seller and the student. The netsuke are now part of a childhood, part of the children’s world of things. This world is made of things they can touch and things they cannot touch. There are things that they can touch sometimes and things they can touch every day. There are things that are theirs, for ever, and things that are theirs but that will be passed on to a sister or brother.
The children are not allowed into the silver-room where the footmen polish the silver, and they are not allowed into the dining-room if there is going to be a dinner. They must not touch their father’s glass in its silver holder, out of which he drinks black tea à la Russe– it was grandfather’s. Lots of things in the Palais were grandfather’s, but this is special. Father’s books are placed on the library table when they arrive from Frankfurt and London and Paris in their brown paper parcels tied up with string. They are not allowed to touch the sharp silver paper-knife that also lies there. Later they are given the stamps from the parcels for their album.
There are things in this world that the children hear, but whose sounds oscillate below an adult’s sense of pitch. They hear the green-and-gold clock in the salon (which has mermaids on it) tick every slow second as they sit in starched immobility during visits from great-aunts. They can hear the shuffle of the carriage horses in the courtyard, which means they are finally off to the park. There is the sound of the rain on the glass roof over the courtyard, which means they are not.
There are things that the children smell that are part of their landscape: the smell of their father’s cigar smoke in the library, their mother, or the smell of schnitzel on covered dishes as it is carried past the nursery for lunch. The smell behind the itchy tapestries in the dining-room when they creep behind them to hide. And the smell of hot chocolate after skating. Emmy makes this for them sometimes. Chocolate is brought in on a porcelain dish, and then they are allowed to break it into pieces the size of a krone and these dark shards are melted in a little silver saucepan by Emmy over a purple flame. Then, when it is glaucous, warm milk is poured over it and sugar stirred in.
There are things that they see with complete clarity – the clarity of an object seen through a lens. There are also things that they see as a blur: the corridors chased along, corridors that go on for ever, one gilded flash of a picture after another, one marble table after another. There are eighteen doors if you run all the way round the courtyard corridor.
The netsuke have moved from a world of Gustave Moreau in Paris to the world of a Dulac children’s book in Vienna. They build their own echoes, they are part of those Sunday mornings’ story-telling, part of The Arabian Nights, the travels of Sinbad the Sailor and the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. They are locked into their vitrine, behind the dressing-room door, which is along the corridor and up the long stairs from the courtyard,