The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [78]
When Viktor arrives home, he spends more time in his study. ‘A library,’ he says, quoting Victor Hugo, ‘is an act of faith.’ Fewer books arrive for him: nothing from Petersburg, Paris, London, Florence. He is disappointed in the quality of a volume sent from a new dealer in Berlin. Who knows what he is reading in there, smoking his cigars? Sometimes a supper tray is prepared and taken in. Things are not so good between him and Emmy, and the children hear her raised voice more often.
Before the war every summer there was an operation with ladders and buckets and mops over the courtyard roof. Because there are no manservants, the glass over the courtyard has not been cleaned for two years. The light coming in is greyer than ever before.
Boundaries become indistinct. As a child, your patriotism is simultaneously unequivocal and confused. On the streets and at school you hear of ‘British envy, French thirst for revenge and Russian rapacity’. Where you can go diminishes by the month, for all the family networks are in suspension. There are letters, but you cannot see your English or French cousins, cannot travel as you used to.
In the summer the family cannot go to the Chalet Ephrussi in Lucerne, so they go to Kövesces for the whole long holiday. This means that at least they can eat properly. There is roast hare, game pies and plum dumplings, to be eaten hot mit Schlag, with whipped cream. In September there is a shooting party, when cousins who are on leave from the shooting at the Front come to shoot partridge.
On 26th October the Prime Minister Karl von Stürgkh is assassinated in a restaurant at the Meissel & Schadn Hotel on Kärntner Strasse. There are two points of general interest. First, that his assassin is the radical socialist Fritz Adler, son of the Social Democrat leader Viktor Adler. Second, that he had eaten a lunch of mushroom soup, boiled beef with mashed turnips and a pudding. He had been drinking a wine spritzer. There is an ancillary point of interest that excites the children greatly: it is at this very restaurant that they had eaten Ischler Torte, chocolate cake with almond and cherry filling, with their parents earlier in the summer.
On 21st November 1916 Franz Josef I dies.
All the newspapers have black borders: Death of our Emperor, Kaiser Franz Josef, The Emperor – dead! Several have engravings of him with his characteristic mistrustful look. Die Neue Freie Presse carries no feuilleton. Wiener Zeitung has the most satisfyingly graphic response, a death-notice on a blank white page. All the weeklies follow suit, apart from Die Bombe, which has a picture of a girl surprised in her bed by a gentleman.
Franz Josef was eighty-six and had been on the throne since 1848. On a wintry day there is a massive funeral cortège through Vienna. The streets are lined with soldiers. His coffin is on a hearse pulled by eight horses with black plumes. On either side march aged archdukes with chests of medals and representatives of all the imperial guards. Behind him walk the young, new Emperor Karl and his wife Zita, in a veil to the ground, and between them their four year-old son Otto wearing white with a black sash. The funeral takes place in the cathedral with the Kings of Bulgaria, Bavaria, Saxony and Württemberg present, fifty archdukes and duchesses and forty other princes and princesses. Then the cortège winds its way to the Capuchin church in the Neue Markt close to the Hofburg palace. The destination is the Kaisergruft, the imperial tomb. There is the drama of admittance to the church – the guards knock three times and are refused twice – and then Franz Josef is buried between his wife Elisabeth and his long-dead eldest son, the suicide Rudolf.
The children are taken to the Meissel & Schadn Hotel on a corner of Kärntner Strasse, where they had that delicious cake, to watch the cortège from a first-floor window. It is extremely cold.