The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [92]
The fact that Iggie was not particularly good with his figures was swept aside. Plans were made for him to continue his studies in finance at Cologne at the university. This had the advantage of allowing Pips – now on his second marriage, this time to a glamorous film actress – to keep an avuncular eye on him. Iggie was given a tiny car as a gesture towards independent living, and he looks good in it. He survived this ordeal – three whole years of German lectures – and started work in a Frankfurt bank, which ‘gave me the opportunity to acquaint myself with all phases of the banking business’ as he drily put it in a letter years later.
He would not talk of these years, except to say to me that being a Jewish banker in Germany in the Depression was unwise. These were the years of the Nazi ascendancy when the votes for Hitler spiralled higher, when the paramilitary SA doubled its membership to 400,000, and when street battles became part of the life of cities. Hitler was appointed Chancellor on 30th January 1933 and a month later, after the Reichstag fire, thousands were taken into ‘preventive detention’. The largest of these new detention camps was on the edge of Bavaria in Dachau.
In July 1933 Iggie was expected back in Vienna to start at the bank.
It was not wise to stay in Germany, but it was not a propitious time to return to Austria. Vienna was turbulent. The Austrian Chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuss, had suspended the constitution in the face of increasing Nazi pressure. There were violent confrontations between police and demonstrators, and some days Viktor did not even go to the bank, but waited impatiently all day for the evening papers to be brought to him in the library.
Iggie did not turn up. He ran away. The list of reasons for running away started with the bank – the smirk that the doorman always gave him – but tangled into Vienna. And then tangled further into Family: Papa, the old cook Clara and her welcoming veal pie with potato salad, Anna fussing over his shirts, his room with its Biedermeier bed waiting for him along the familiar long corridor, past the dressing-room, the counterpane turned down at six.
Iggie ran to Paris. He began work in a ‘third-rung fashion house’ learning how to sketch tea-gowns. He spent nights learning how to cut in an atelier, starting to sense how the scissors slip across a billowing field of green shot-silk. Four hours’ sleep on the floor of a friend’s apartment and then coffee and back to drawing. Fifteen minutes for lunch, coffee, and back again.
He is poor: he learns the tricks to keeping clothes clean and smart, how to take in and hem cuffs. He has a small allowance from Vienna that continues, without comment, from his parents. And though it must be mortifying for Viktor to explain to his friends that Iggie is not joining the firm – and perhaps he mumbles when asked what Iggie is actually doing in Paris – I wonder if he has sympathy for his son. Viktor must know about running away and not running away, just as Emmy must know about staying.
Iggie is twenty-eight. As with Emmy, clothes are a vocation. All those nightly hours in the dressing-room with the netsuke and Anna and his mother, smoothing down a dress, comparing lace details at cuff or neck. All those dressing-up games with Gisela, the trunk of old gowns kept in the box-room at the far corner. The old copies of Wiener Mode, pored over on the parquetry floor of the salon. Iggie could tell you how the trousers of one imperial regiment differed in cut from another and how you could wear crêpe de Chine on the bias. And now, finally, he finds that he is not as good as he had hoped, but he has started.
And then, after nine hard months, he runs away again, to New York, to boys and to fashion. This was a trinity so wonderful in its cadence that in very old age he couldn’t help smilingly describing the voyage to New York as a sort of baptismal crossing from one life to another, a voyage in some way into himself.
I know a little about this from his wry attempts to make me