The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [96]
It is as if a switch has been thrown. There are runnels of noise down the street, the Schottengasse echoing with voices. They are shouting, ‘Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer’ and ‘Heil Hitler, Sieg Heil’. And they are screaming ‘Jude Verreke!’ – perish Judah! Death to the Jews!
It is a flood of brown shirts. There are taxi horns blaring and there are men with weapons on the streets, and somehow the police have swastika armbands. There are trucks rushing along the Ring, past the house, past the university towards the Town Hall. And the trucks have swastikas on them, and the trams have swastikas on them, and there are young men and boys hanging off them, shouting and waving.
And someone turns out the lights in the library, as if being in the dark will make them invisible, but the noise reaches into the house, into the room, into their lungs. Someone is being beaten in the street below. What are they going to do? How long can you pretend this is not happening?
Some friends pack a suitcase and go out into the street, push through these swirling, eddying masses of ecstatic citizens of Vienna to get to the Westbahnhof. The night train to Prague leaves at 11.15, but by nine it is completely packed. Men in uniforms swarm through the train and pull people off.
By 11.15 Nazi flags are hanging from the parapets of government ministries. At half-past midnight President Miklas gives in and approves the cabinet. At 1.08 a.m. a Major Klausner announces from the balcony ‘with deep emotion in this festive hour that Austria is free, that Austria is National Socialist’.
There are queues of people on foot or in cars at the Czech frontier. The radio is now playing the Badenweiler and the Hofenfriedberger, German military marches. These are interspersed with slogans. The first Jewish shop windows are broken.
And it is on that first night that the sounds of the street become shouting in the Ephrussi courtyard, echoing around the walls and off the roof. Then there are feet pounding up the stairs, the thirty-three shallow steps to the apartment on the second floor.
There are fists on the door, someone leaning on the bell, and there are eight or ten, a knot of them in some sort of uniform – some with swastika armbands, some familiar. Some are still boys. It is one o’clock in the morning and no one is asleep, everyone is dressed. Viktor and Emmy and Rudolf are pushed into the library.
This first night they swarm through the apartment. There are shouts from across the courtyard, as a couple of them have found the salon with its French ensembles of furniture and porcelain. There is laughter from someone as Emmy’s closet is ransacked. Someone bangs out a tune on the piano keys. Some men are in the study pulling out drawers, roughing up the desks, pushing the folios off the stand in the corner. They come into the library and tip the globes from their stands. This convulsive disordering, messing up, sweeping off is barely looting; it is a stretching of muscles, a cracking of the knuckles, a loosening up. The people in the corridors are checking, looking, exploring, working out what is here.
They take the silver candlesticks held up by slightly drunken fauns from the dining-room, small animals in malachite from mantelpieces, silver cigarette boxes, money held in a clip from a desk in Viktor’s study. A small Russian clock, pink enamel and gold, that rang the hours in the salon. And the large clock from the library with its golden dome held up by columns.
They have walked past this house for years, glimpsed faces at windows, seen into the courtyard as the doorman holds the gate open