The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [94]
Sometimes Elisabeth took the children back to Vienna to see their grandparents and their uncle Rudolf, now a teenager. The chauffeur took Viktor and the grandchildren out in the back of the long black car.
Emmy was not terribly well – a heart condition – and had started to take pills. She looks much older in the few pictures of her from these years, and slightly surprised by middle age, but is still beautifully dressed in a black cloak with a white collar, a hat pinned at an angle to her grey curls, one hand on my father and another on my uncle’s shoulder. Anna must be looking after her well. And she still falls in love.
She says she is not ready to be a grandmother, but she sends my father a series of colourful postcards from the stories of Hans Christian Anderson, ‘The Swineherd’, ‘The Princess and the Pea’, ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’. Dozens of cards each with a short message, one every week without fail, each one signed ‘with a thousand kisses from Your Grandmother’. Emmy still cannot resist telling stories.
Rudolf, growing up at home, without his sisters or his brother from one year to the next, is tall and handsome and in one picture he is dressed in riding breeches and an army greatcoat, framed by a doorway in the salon of the Palais. He plays the saxophone. Its echo must have sounded glorious in the increasingly empty rooms.
Elisabeth and the boys spent a fortnight in Vienna at the Palais in July 1934, the weeks in which there was an attempted coup led by the Austrian SS, in which Chancellor Dollfuss was assassinated in his office, the signal for a Nazi uprising. It was put down with heavy casualties, and the new Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg was sworn in against a real fear of civil war. My father remembers waking in the nursery in the Palais and running to the window to see a fire-truck rattling down the Ring with its bells ringing. I have tried to get him to remember more (Nazi demonstrations? armed police? crisis?), but he is not suggestible. A fire-truck is the alpha and omega of his 1934 Vienna.
Viktor hardly pretends to be a banker any more. Perhaps as a consequence of this, or the competence of his deputy, Herr Steinhausser, the bank is doing well. He still goes to the bank every day, where he studies long, closely printed catalogues from Leipzig and Heidelberg. He has taken up collecting incunabula, early printed books, and his particular passion – more intense since the crumbling of the Empire – is for Roman history. The books are kept in the library overlooking the Schottengasse in a tall bookcase with a mesh door, and the key is kept on his watch chain. Early printed Latin histories seem a characteristically abstruse thing – and an expensive thing – to collect, but he is interested in empires.
Viktor and Emmy holiday together at Kövesces, but since the death of her parents it is a strangely diminished place, with only a couple of horses in the stables and fewer gamekeepers and no great weekend shoots any more. Emmy walks down to the bend in the river, past the willows where you can get the breeze, and back before dinner as she used to with the children, but with her heart problem she is quite slow. The swimming lake has been let go. Its edges are susurrating reeds.
The Ephrussi children are dispersed. Elisabeth is still in the Alps, but has moved to Ascona in Switzerland and comes to Vienna with her boys when she can. Anna makes a great fuss of them. Iggie is now designing cruise-wear in Hollywood. And Gisela and her family have had to leave Madrid for Mexico because of the Spanish Civil War.
By 1938 Emmy is fifty-eight years old and is still very handsome, her rope of pearls looping around her neck and down to her waist. Vienna is a chaotic place to be living in, but life in the Palais is strangely immobile. There are eight servants to keep this stasis perfect. Nothing really happens, though the table is set in the dining-room for one o’clock, and again for dinner at eight, but this time it is Rudolf who does not appear. He is out, she