The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [97]
The last door they reach is Emmy’s dressing-room in the corner, the room with the vitrine containing the netsuke, and they sweep everything off the desk she uses as a dressing-table: the small mirror and the porcelain and the silver boxes and the flowers sent up from the meadows in Kövesces that Anna arranges in the vase, and they drag the desk out into the corridor.
They push Emmy and Viktor and Rudolf against the wall, and three of them heave the desk and send it crashing over the handrail until, with a sound of splintering wood and gilt and marquetry, it hits the stone flags of the courtyard below.
This desk – the wedding-present from Fanny and Jules, from Paris – takes a long time to fall. The sounds ricochet off the glass roof. The broken drawers scatter letters across the courtyard.
You think you own us, you fucking foreign shit. You’ll be fucking next, you shit, you fucking Jews.
This is a Wilde, unsanctioned Aryanisation. No sanction is needed.
The sound of things breaking is the reward for waiting for so long. This night is full of these rewards. It has been a long time coming. This night is the story told by grandparents to grandchildren, the story of how one night the Jews will finally be held accountable for all they have done, for all they have robbed off the poor; of how the streets will be cleaned, how light will be shone into all the dark places. Because it is all about dirt, about the pollution the Jews brought to the imperial city from their stinking hovels, the way they took what was ours.
All across Vienna doors are broken down, as children hide behind their parents, under beds, in cupboards – anywhere to get away from the noise as fathers and brothers are arrested and beaten up and pulled outside into trucks, as mothers and sisters are abused. And across Vienna people help themselves to what should be theirs, is theirs by right.
It is not that you cannot sleep. You cannot go to bed. When these men go, when these men and boys finally go, they say that they’ll be back, and you know they mean it. Emmy is wearing her pearls and they take them off. They take her rings. Someone pauses to spit handsomely at your feet. And they clatter down the stairs, shouting until they reach the courtyard. One takes a run to kick the debris, and they are out through the doors onto the Ring, a large clock under an overcoated arm.
Snow is on its way.
In that grey dawn, on Sunday 13th March, when there should have been the plebiscite for a free, German, independent, social, Christian and united Austria, there are neighbours on their hands and knees scrubbing away at the streets of Vienna – kids and the elderly, the man who owned the newspaper kiosk on the Ring, the orthodox, the liberal, the pious and the radical, the old men who knew their Goethe and believed in Bildung, the violin teacher and her mother – surrounded by SS, by Gestapo and by NSDAP (Nazi Party Members), by policemen and by the people they have lived next to for years and years. Jeered at, spat at, shouted at, beaten, bruised. Scrubbing away at the Schuschnigg plebiscite slogans, making Vienna clean again, making Vienna ready. We thank our Führer. He’s created work for the Jews.
In a photograph a young man in his shiny jacket oversees the middle-aged women on their knees in the soapy water. And he has rolled up his trouser legs to make sure they do not get damp. It is all about the dirty and the clean.
The house has been breached. And that morning, as my great-grandmother and great-grandfather sit in silence in the library, there is Anna picking up the photographs of cousins from the floor, sweeping the broken fragments of porcelain and marquetry away, straightening pictures, trying to get the carpets clean, trying to close the door that has been opened.
All that day squadrons of Luftwaffe planes fly low over Vienna. Viktor