September and October are at Kövecses with the children and parents, Pips and lots of cousins. Viktor comes for a few days at a time. Swim, walk, ride, shoot.
At Kövecses there is an eccentric collection of people gathered together to educate Emmy’s sisters, Gerty and Eva, twelve and fifteen years junior to her. These now include a French lady’s maid to give them a proper Parisian accent, an elderly schoolmaster to teach them the three Rs, a governess from Trieste for German and Italian, and finally a failed concert pianist (Mr Minotti) to teach them music and chess. Emmy’s mother gives them English dictation and reads Shakespeare with them. There is also the elderly Viennese boot-maker who makes the white suede boots about which Evelina is so very particular. Struck low, he comes to convalesce on the estate, is given a pleasant sunny room and stays for the rest of his life, keeping her in footwear and taking charge of the dogs.
The traveller Patrick Leigh Fermor stayed in Kövecses on his walk across Europe in the 1930s and described it as still having the atmosphere of an English rectory, with piles of books in all possible languages and desks cluttered with odd objects made from antlers and silver. It was ‘Liberty Hall’, said Pips, welcoming him in his perfect English to the library. Kövecses radiated the sense of self-sufficiency that comes about when there are lots of children in a big house. In my father’s blue paper folder there is a yellowing manuscript of a play called Der Grossherzog (The Archduke) put on one summer before the First World War by all the cousins in the drawing-room. Babies under two and dogs are strictly forbidden.
Mr Minotti plays the piano each night after dinner. The children play ‘Kim’s game’. Objects – a card case, pince-nez, a shell and once, thrillingly, Pips’s revolver – are placed on a tray and brought in uncovered for thirty seconds. The linen is replaced and you then write down what you can recall. Elisabeth, boringly, wins every single time.
Pips invites his cosmopolitan friends to stay.
December is Vienna and Christmas. Though they are Jewish, they celebrate with lots of presents.
And Emmy’s life seems set, not exactly in stone, but in amber. It seems preserved, the series of period stories, both generic and precious, that I promised myself I would escape from when I set out a year ago. The netsuke seem so far away as I keep circling the Palais.
I extend my stay in Vienna at the Pension Baronesse. They have kindly fixed my glasses, but the world is still slightly askew. I can’t shake off my anxiety. My uncle in London has been searching for information for me and has produced twelve pages of a memoir that my grandmother Elisabeth wrote about growing up in the Palais, and I have brought them to read in situ. It is a sunny morning of breath-catching cold and I take them to the Café Central, with light streaming through the Gothic windows. There is a model of the writer Peter Altenberg holding the menu, and everything is very clean and carefully presented. This was Viktor’s second café, I think, before it all went so wrong.
The café, this street, Vienna itself is a theme park: a fin-de-siècle film-set, glitteringly Secessionist. Fiacres trundling round with coachmen in greatcoats. The waiters have period moustaches. Strauss is everywhere, seeping from the chocolate shops. I keep expecting Mahler to walk in, or Klimt to start an argument. I keep thinking of a dreadful film I saw years ago when I was at university. It was set in Paris, and Picasso kept walking past, and Gertrude Stein and James Joyce were discussing Modernism over their Pernod. This is the problem I’m having here, I realise, assailed by one cliché after another. My Vienna has thinned into other people’s Vienna.
I’ve been reading the seventeen novels of Joseph Roth, the Austrian Jewish novelist, some set in Vienna during the last years of the Hapsburg Empire. It is in the unimpeachable Efrussi Bank – Roth spells it in the Russian manner – that Trotta deposits his wealth in The Radetzky March. Ignace Ephrussi himself is sketched as a rich jeweller in The Spider’s Web: ‘lank and tall, and always [wearing] black, with a high collared coat which just revealed a black silk stock pinned by a pearl the size of a hazelnut’. His wife, the beautiful Frau Efrussi, is ‘a lady: Jewish: but a lady’. Everyone had an easy life, says Theodor, the young and bitter Gentile protagonist, employed by the family as a tutor, ‘the Efrussis the easiest of all…Pictures in gold frames hung in the hall and a footman in green and gold livery bowed as he escorted you in.’
The real keeps slipping out of my hands. The lives of my family in Vienna were refracted into books, just like Charles in Proust’s Paris. The dislike of the Ephrussi keeps turning up in novels.
I stumble. I realise that I do not understand what it means to be part of an assimilated, acculturated Jewish family. I simply don’t understand. I know what they didn’t do: they never went to synagogue, but their births and marriages are recorded here by the Rabbinate. I know that they paid their dues to the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde, the IKA, gave money to Jewish charities. I’ve been to see Joachim and Ignace’s mausoleum in the Jewish section of the cemetery, and worried about its broken cast-iron gate and whether I should pay to get it fixed. Zionism didn’t seem to hold many attractions, for them. I remember those rude comments from Herzl when he wrote to them for donations and got brushed off. The Ephrussi, speculators. I wonder whether it was plain embarrassment at the fervent Jewishness of the enterprise and not wanting to attract attention to themselves. Or whether it was a symptom of their confidence in their new homeland here on Zionstrasse, or on the rue de Monceau. They simply didn’t see why others needed another Zion.
Does assimilation mean that they never came up against naked prejudice? Does it mean that you understood where the limits of your social world were and you stuck to them? There is a Jockey Club in Vienna, as in Paris, and Viktor was a member, but Jews weren’t allowed to hold office. Did this matter to him in the slightest? It was understood that married Gentile women never visited Jewish households, never came to leave a card, never visited on one of the interminable afternoons. Vienna meant that only Gentile bachelors, Count Mensdorff, Count Lubienski, the young Prince of Montenuovo, left cards and were then invited. Once married they never came, no matter how good the dinners were, or how pretty the hostess. Did this matter at all? These seem such gossamer threads of rudeness.
I spend my last morning of this visit in the records of the Vienna Jewish community next to the synagogue off Judengasse. There are police nearby. In the latest elections the far right has just won a third of the popular vote, and no one knows if the synagogue is a target. There have been so many threats that I must pass through a complex security system. Finally inside, I watch as the archivist pulls out the folio records, one striped volume after another, and lays them on the lectern. Each birth and marriage and death, each conversion, the whole of Jewish Vienna faithfully recorded.
In 1899 Vienna has its own Jewish orphanages and hospitals, schools and libraries, newspapers and journals. It has twenty-two synagogues. And, I realise, I know nothing about any of them: the Ephrussi family are so perfectly assimilated they have disappeared into Vienna.
17. THE SWEET YOUNG THING
Elisabeth’s memoir is a tonic: twelve unsentimental pages written for her sons in the 1970s. ‘The house I was born in stood, and still stands, outwardly unaltered, on the corner of the Ring…’ She gives details of the running of the household, she gives the names of the horses, and she walks me through the rooms in the Palais. Finally, I think, I will find out where Emmy has hidden the netsuke.
If Emmy turns right out of the nursery and goes along the corridor she enters the sides of the courtyard with the kitchens and sculleries, the pantry and the silver-room – where the light burns all day – and then on to the butler’s room and the servants’ hall. At the end of this corridor are all the maids’ rooms, rooms whose windows open only into the courtyard, some yellow light filtering in through the glassed roof, but no fresh air. Her maid Anna’s room is down there somewhere.
When Emmy turns left she is in her drawing-room. She has hung it with pale-green silk brocade. The carpets
are a very pale yellow. Her furniture is Louis XV, chairs and fauteuils of inlaid woods with bronze mounts and fat striped silk cushions. There are occasional tables, each with their little set-piece of bibelots, and a larger table on which she could perform the intricacies of making tea. There is a grand piano that is never played and a Renaissance Italian cabinet with folding doors, painted on the inside, and very small drawers that the children aren’t meant to play with, but do. When Elisabeth reached between the tiny gilded twisty columns on either side of an arch and pressed upwards, a tiny secret drawer came out with an exhaled breath.
There is light in these rooms, trembling reflections and glints of silver and porcelain and polished fruitwood, and shadows from the linden trees. In the spring flowers are sent up each week from Kövecses. It is a perfect place to display a vitrine with cousin Charles’ netsuke, but they are not here.
On from the drawing-room is the library, the largest room on this floor of the Palais. It is painted black and red, like Ignace’s great suite of rooms on the floor below, with a black-and-red Turkish carpet and huge ebony bookshelves lining the walls and large tobacco-coloured leather armchairs and sofas. A large brass chandelier hangs over an ebony table inlaid with ivory flanked by the pair of globes. This is Viktor’s room, thousands of his books running over the walls, his Latin and Greek histories and his German literature and his poetry and his lexicons. Some of the bookcases have a fine golden mesh over them and are locked with a key that he keeps on his watch chain. Still no vitrine.
And on from the library is the dining-room, with walls covered in Gobelin tapestries of the hunt, bought by Ignace in Paris, and windows overlooking the courtyard, but with the curtains drawn, so that the room is in perpetual gloom. This must be the dining table where the gold dinner service is set out, each plate and bowl engraved with ears of corn and a double Ephrussi E slap-bang in the middle, the boat with its puffed-out sails skimming across a golden sea.
The gold dinner service must have been Ignace’s idea. His furniture is everywhere. Renaissance cabinets, carved baroque chests, a huge Boulle desk that could only be kept in the ballroom downstairs. His pictures are everywhere, too. Lots of Old Masters, a Holy Family, a Florentine Madonna. There are seventeenth-century Dutch pictures by some quite good artists: Wouwermans, Cuyp, something after Frans Hals. There were also lots and lots of Junge Frauen, some by Hans Makart; interchangeable young ladies in interchangeable frocks in rooms surrounded by ‘velvets, carpets, genius, panther skins, knickknacks, peacock feathers, chests, and lutes’ (Musil in acidic mood). All of them framed in heavy gold or heavy black. No Parisian vitrine full of netsuke amongst these pictures, this spectacular, theatrical display, this treasure-house.
Everything here, each grandiloquent picture and cabinet, seems immovable in the light that filters in from the glassed-in courtyard. Musil understood this atmosphere. In great old houses there is a muddle where hideous new furniture stands carelessly alongside magnificent old, inherited pieces. In the rooms of the Palais belonging to the ostentatious nouveaux riches, everything is too defined, there is ‘some hardly perceptible widening of the space between the pieces of furniture or the dominant position of a painting on a wall, the tender, clear echo of a great sound that had faded away’.
I think of Charles with all his treasures, and know that it was his passion for them that kept them moving. Charles could not resist the world of things: touching them; studying them; buying them; rearranging them. The vitrine of netsuke that he has given to Viktor and Emmy made a space in his salon for something new. He kept his rooms in flux.
The Palais Ephrussi is the exact opposite. Under the grey-glassed roof, the whole house is like a vitrine that you cannot escape.
At either end of the long enfilade are Viktor and Emmy’s private rooms. Viktor’s dressing-room has his cupboards and chests of drawers and a long mirror. There is a life-size plaster bust of his tutor, Herr Wessel, ‘whom he had very much loved. Herr Wessel had been a Prussian and a great admirer of Bismarck and of all things German.’ The other great thing in the room, never discussed, is a very large – and highly unsuitable – Italian painting of Leda and the Swan. In her memoir Elisabeth wrote that she ‘used to stare at it – it was huge – every time I went in to see my father change into a stiff shirt and dinner jacket for going out in the evening, and could never discover what the objection might be’. Viktor has already explained that there is no space for knick-knacks here.
Emmy’s dressing-room is at the other end of the corridor, a corner room with windows looking out across the Ring to the Votivkirche and onto the Schottengasse. It has the beautiful Louis XVI desk given to the couple by Jules and Fanny, with its gently bowed legs with ormolu mounts ending in gilt hooves, and drawers that are lined with soft leather in which Emmy keeps her writing paper and letters tied up in ribbons. And she has a full-length mirror hinged in three parts so that she can see herself properly when dressing. It takes up most of the room. And a dressing-table and washstand with a silver-rimmed glass basin and a matching glass jug with a silver top.
And here at last we find the black lacquer cabinet – ‘as tall as a tall man’ in Iggie’s memory – with its green velvet-lined shelves. Emmy has put the vitrine in her dressing-room, with its mirrored back and all 264 netsuke from cousin Charles. This is where my brindled wolf has ended up.
This makes so much sense, and yet it makes no sense at all. Who comes into a dressing-room? It is hardly a social space, and certainly not a salon. If the boxwood turtles and the persimmon and the cracked little ivory of the girl in her bath are kept here on their green velvet shelves, this means that they do not have to be explained at Emmy’s at-homes. They do not have to be mentioned at all by Viktor. Could it be embarrassment that brings the vitrine here?
Or was the decision to take the netsuke away from the public gaze intentional, away from all that Makart pomposity; putting them into the one room that was completely Emmy’s own because she was intrigued by them? Was it to save them from the dead hand of Ringstrassenstil? There was not much in these Ephrussi parade grounds of gilt furniture and ormolu that you might want to have near you. The netsuke are intimate objects for an intimate room. Did Emmy want something that was simply – and literally – untouched by her father-in-law Ignace? A little bit of Parisian glamour?
This is her room. She spent a great deal of time in it. She changed three times a day – sometimes more. Putting on a hat to go to the races, with lots of little curls pinned one by one to the underside of the hat’s wide brim, took forty minutes. To put on the long embroidered ballgown with a hussar’s jacket, intricate with frogging, took for ever. There was dressing up for parties, for shopping, dinner, visiting, riding to the Prater and balls. Each hour in this dressing-room was a calibration of corset, dress, gloves and hat with the day, the shrugging-off of one self and the lacing into another. She has to be sewn into some dresses, Anna, kneeling at her feet, producing thread, needle, thimble from the pocket of her apron. Emmy has furs, sable trimming to a hem, an arctic fox around her neck in one photograph, a six-foot stole of bear looped over a gown in another. An hour could pass with Anna fetching different gloves.
Emmy and an archduke, Vienna, 1906
Emmy dresses to go out. It is winter 1906 in a Viennese street and she is talking to an archduke. They are smiling as she hands him some primroses. She is wearing a pin-striped costume: an A-line skirt with a deep panel at the hem cut across the grain and a matching close-cut Zouave jacket. It is a walking costume. To dress for that walk down Herrengasse would have taken an hour and a half: pantalettes, chemise in fine batiste or crêpe de Chine, corset to nip in the waist, stockings, garters, button boots, skirt with hooks up the plaquette, then either a blouse or a chemisette – so no bulk on her arms – with a high-stand collar and lace jabot, then the jacket done up with a false front, then her small purse – a reticule – hanging on a chain, jewellery, fur hat with striped taffeta bow to echo the costume, white gloves, flowers. And no sce
nt; she does not wear it.
The vitrine in the dressing-room is sentinel to a ritual that took place twice a year in spring and autumn, the ritual of choosing a wardrobe for the coming season. Ladies did not go to a dressmaker to inspect the new models; the models were brought to them. The head of a dressmaker’s would go to Paris and select gowns that came carefully packed in several huge boxes, with an elderly, white-haired, black-suited gentleman, Herr Schuster. His boxes were piled up in the passage, where he sat with them; they were carried into Emmy’s dressing-room one by one by Anna. When Emmy was dressed, Herr Schuster was ushered in for pronouncement. ‘Of course he always approved, but if he found Mama inclined to favour one of them to the extent of wanting to try it on again, he waxed ecstatic, saying that the dress absolutely “screamed for the Baroness”.’ The children waited for this moment and then would race down the corridor to the nursery in panicky fits of hysterics.
There is a picture of Emmy taken in the salon soon after she married Viktor. She must be pregnant with Elisabeth already, but not showing. She is dressed like Marie Antoinette in a cropped velvet jacket over a long white skirt, a play between severity and nonchalance. Her ringlets conform to what is au courant in the spring of 1900: ‘coiffure is less stiff than it was formerly; fringes are prohibited. The hair is first crimped into large waves, then combed back and twisted into a moderately high coil…locks are allowed to escape onto the forehead, left in their natural ringed form,’ writes a journalist. Emmy has a black hat with feathers. One hand rests on a French marble-topped chest of drawers and the other holds a cane. She must be just down from the dressing-room and off to another ball. She looks at me confidently, aware of how gorgeous she is.
Emmy has her admirers – many admirers, according to my great-uncle Iggie – and dressing for others is as much a pleasure as undressing. From the start of her marriage she has lovers, too.
The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss Page 14
