The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [91]
In terms of religious faith it is an interesting marriage. Henk had grown up in a severe family – they look doomed in their black suits and dresses – but had converted to become Mennonite. Elisabeth, who felt completely confident of her Jewishness, was reading the Christian mystics and talking about conversion. Not expedient conversion for marriage, or to fit in with the neighbours, or to Catholicism – I’m not sure if any Jewish girl brought up in Vienna opposite the Votivkirche would choose to do that – but to the Church of England. They go to the Anglican church in Paris.
When things did not go well with the Anglo-Batavian Trading Company, Henk lost a lot of his own money, and other people’s too. He lost, inter alia, a fortune belonging to Piz, the wild cousin and childhood friend, who had become an up-and-coming Expressionist painter and was living a bohemian life in Frankfurt. Losing this amount of money was a nightmare, and the maid and the chauffeur were let go and the furniture was put into storage in Paris and there were discussions of labyrinthine complexity.
Henk’s incompetence with money was different from his father-in-law Viktor’s. Henk could make numbers dance. My father talks of how he could scan three columns, take away another column and conjure a (correct) total with a smile. It was just that he believed he could do the same sleight of hand with money. He believed that it was all going to come right, that the markets would move, the ships would come into port and that fortunes would click back together like his slim shagreen cigarette case. He was, simply, deluded in his abilities.
And I understand that Viktor never believed he had any control over the columns of figures at all. I wonder, very belatedly, what it was like for Elisabeth to realise that she had married a man almost as poor with money as her father.
Iggie graduated from the Schottengymnasium and was the third to leave. I have his graduation photograph and can’t find him at first, until I suddenly recognise a rather portly young man in the back row in a double-breasted suit. He looks like a stockbroker. Bow-tie and handkerchief, a young man practising how to stand properly, how to look convincing. Do you, for instance, stand with one hand in your pocket? Or are two hands in pockets better? Or even, this is most endearing, one hand inside the waistcoat, a clubman pose.
To celebrate the end of his schooling, he went for a motoring tour with his childhood friends the Gutmanns, from Vienna to Paris the long way round through northern Italy and the Riviera in a Hispano-Suiza, an elephantine car of fabled luxury. In some cold, bright pass somewhere, three young things sit in the back with the hood down, swaddled in their motoring coats with goggles up over their motoring caps. Their luggage is piled in front of them. A chauffeur hovers. The bonnet of the car disappears to the left of the photograph and the boot of the car disappears to the right. It feels balanced on the faintest breath of a fulcrum, hovering between deep descents.
It would have been difficult to have Elisabeth as an older sister if you were academic: Iggie was not bookish. The family finances are not so rocky in these days – Emmy, an elegant forty-five, is buying clothes again – but Iggie does need to concentrate and not just spend his time watching endless looping afternoons of films in the cinemas. Viktor and Emmy are clear about his future. Iggie should join the bank, turn left and left again each morning with his father, sit at a desk under the shield with the little boat ploughing its way onwards, Quod Honestum, through the generations from Joachim to Ignace and Leon, and then to Viktor and Jules, and now to Iggie. Iggie was, after all, the only young man in the whole of the extended Ephrussi family,