The Hare with Amber Eyes (2 page)

Do you know, he says suddenly, that Japanese plum dumplings are better than Viennese plum dumplings?

Actually, he resumes, after a pause, Papa always said that he’d put me up for his club when I was old enough. It met on Thursdays somewhere near the Opera, with all his friends, his Jewish friends. He came back so cheerful on Thursdays. The Wiener Club. I always wanted to go there with him, but he never took me. I left for Paris and then New York, you see, and then there was the war.

I miss that. I missed that.

Iggie died in 1994 soon after I returned to England. Jiro rang me: there had been only three days in hospital. It was a relief. I came back to Tokyo for his funeral. There were two dozen of us, their old friends, Jiro’s family, Mrs Nakano and her daughter, clouded in tears.

There is the cremation, and we gather together and the ashes are brought out, and in turns a pair of us pick up long black chopsticks and put the fragments of unburnt bone into an urn.

We go to the temple where Iggie and Jiro have their interment plot. They had planned this tomb twenty years before. The cemetery is on a hill behind the temple, each plot marked with small stone walls. There is the grey gravestone with both their names already inscribed on it, and a place for flowers. Buckets of water and brushes and long wooden signs with painted inscriptions on them. You clap three times and greet your family and apologise for the delay since you were last there, and clean up, remove old chrysanthemums and put new ones in water.

At the temple the urn is placed on a small dais and a photograph of Iggie – the photograph of him on the cruise ship in his dinner jacket – is placed in front of it. The abbot chants a sutra and we offer incense, and Iggie is given his new Buddhist name, his
kaimyo
, to help him in his next life.

Then we speak of him. I try to say, in Japanese, how much my great-uncle means to me and cannot because I am in tears and because, despite my expensive two-year scholarship, my Japanese isn’t good enough when I need it. So instead, in this room in this Buddhist temple, in this Tokyo suburb, I say the Kaddish for Ignace von Ephrussi, who is so far from Vienna, for his father and his mother, and for his brother and sisters in their diaspora.

After the funeral Jiro asks me to help sort out Iggie’s clothes. I open the cupboards in his dressing-room and see the shirts ordered by colour. As I pack the ties away, I notice that they map his holidays with Jiro in London and Paris, Honolulu and New York.

When this job is done, over a glass of wine, Jiro takes out his brush and ink and writes a document and seals it. It says, he tells me, that once he has gone I should look after the netsuke.

So I’m next.

There are 264 netsuke in this collection. It is a very big collection of very small objects.

I pick one up and turn it round in my fingers, weigh it in the palm of my hand. If it is wood, chestnut or elm, it is even lighter than the ivory. You see the patina more easily on these wooden ones: there is a faint shine on the spine of the brindled wolf and on the tumbling acrobats locked in their embrace. The ivory ones come in shades of cream, every colour, in fact, but white. A few have inlaid eyes of amber or horn. Some of the older ones are slightly worn away: the haunch of the faun resting on leaves has lost its markings. There is a slight split, an almost imperceptible fault line on the cicada. Who dropped it? Where and when?

Most of them are signed – that moment of ownership when it was finished and let go. There is a wooden netsuke of a seated man holding a gourd between his feet. He’s bending over it, both hands on a knife that is half into the gourd. It is hard work, his arms and shoulder and neck show the effort: every muscle concentrates on the blade. There is another of a cooper working on a half-finished barrel with an adze. He sits leaning into it, framed by it, brows puckered with concentration. It is an ivory carving about what it is like to carve into wood. Both are about finishing something on the subject of the half-finished. Look, they say, I got there first and he’s hardly started.

When you tumble them in your hands there is a pleasure in finding where these signatures have been placed – on the sole of a sandal, the end of a branch, the thorax of a hornet – as well as the play between the strokes. I think of the moves when you sign your name in Japan with ink, the sweep of the brush into the ink, the first plosive moment of contact, the return to the ink stone, and wonder at how you could develop such a distinctive signature using the fine metal tools of the netsuke-maker.

Some of these netsuke carry no name. Some have bits of paper glued to them, bearing tiny numbers carefully written in red pen.

There are a great number of rats. Perhaps because they give the maker the chance to wrap those sinuous tails round each other, over the pails of water, the dead fish, the beggars’ robes, and then fold those paws underneath the carvings. There are also quite a lot of rat-catchers, I realise.

Some of the netsuke are studies in running movement, so that your fingers move along a surface of uncoiling rope, or spilt water. Others have small congested movements that knot your touch: a girl in a wooden bath, a vortex of clam shells. Some do both, surprising you: an intricately ruffled dragon leans against a simple rock. You work your fingers round the smoothness and stoniness of the ivory to meet this sudden density of dragon.

They are always asymmetric, I think with pleasure. As with my favourite Japanese tea-bowls, you cannot understand the whole from a part.

When I am back in London I put one of these netsuke in my pocket for a day and carry it round. Carry is not quite the right word for having a netsuke in a pocket. It sounds too purposeful. A netsuke is so light and so small that it migrates and almost disappears amongst your keys and change. You simply forget that it is there. This was a netsuke of a very ripe medlar fruit, made out of chestnut wood in the late eighteenth century in Edo, the old Tokyo. In autumn in Japan you sometimes see medlars; a branch hanging over a wall of a temple or from a private garden into a street of vending machines is impossibly pleasing. My medlar is just about to go from ripeness to deliquescence. The three leaves at the top feel as if they would fall if you rubbed them between your fingers. The fruit is slightly unbalanced: it is riper on one side than the other. Underneath, you can feel the two holes – one larger than the other – where the silk cord would run, so that the netsuke could act as a toggle on a small bag. I try and imagine who owned the medlar. It was made long before the opening up of Japan to foreign trade in the 1850s, and thus created for the Japanese taste: it might have been carved for a merchant or a scholar. It is a quiet one, undemonstrative, but it makes me smile. Making something to hold out of a very hard material that feels so soft is a slow and rather good tactile pun.

I keep my medlar in my jacket pocket and go to a meeting at a museum about a piece of research I am supposed to be doing, and then to my studio and then to the London Library. I intermittently roll this thing through my fingers.

I realise how much I care about how this hard-and-soft, losable object has survived. I need to find a way of unravelling its story. Owning this netsuke – inheriting them all – means I have been handed a responsibility to them and to the people who have owned them. I am unclear and discomfited about where the parameters of this responsibility might lie.

I know the bones of this journey from Iggie. I know that these netsuke were bought in Paris in the 1870s by a cousin of my great-grandfather called Charles Ephrussi. I know that he gave them as a wedding-present to my great-grandfather Viktor von Ephrussi in Vienna at the turn of the century. I know the story of Anna, my great-grandmother’s maid, very well. And I know that they came with Iggie to Tokyo, of course, and were part of his life with Jiro.

Paris, Vienna, Tokyo, London.

The medlar’s story starts where it is made. Edo, the old Tokyo before the Black Ships of the American Commodore Perry opened Japan up to trade with the rest of the world in 1859. But its first resting-place was in Charles’s study in Paris. It was in a room looking over the rue de Monceau in the Hôtel Ephrussi.

I start well. I’m pleased because I have one direct, spoken link to Charles. As a child of five, my grandmother Elisabeth met Charles at the Chalet Ephrussi in Meggen, on the edge of Lake Lucerne. The ‘chalet’ was six storeys of rusticated stone surmounted by small baronial turrets, a house of stupendous ugliness. It had been built in the early 1880s by Charles’s oldest brother Jules and wife Fanny, as a place to escape the ‘horrid oppression of Paris’. It was huge, grand enough to house all the ‘clan Ephrussi’ from Paris and Vienna, and assorted cousins from Berlin.

The chalet had endless small paths that crunched underfoot, with neat box edging in the English manner, small flowerbeds filled with bedding plants, and a fierce gardener to tell the children off for playing; gravel did not stray in this severe Swiss garden. The garden went down to the lake, where there was a small jetty and boathouse, and more opportunities for reprimand. Jules, Charles and their middle brother Ignace were Russian citizens and the Russian imperial flag flew from the boathouse roof. There were endless slow summers at the chalet. My grandmother was the expected heir of the fabulously wealthy and childless Jules and Fanny. She remembered a large painting in the dining-room of willows by a stream. She also remembered that there were only manservants in the house, and that even the cook was a man, which was wildly more exciting than her own family’s household in Vienna with only old Josef the butler, the porter who would wink at her as he opened the gates to the Ring and the grooms amidst all the maids and cooks. Apparently manservants were less likely to break the porcelain. And, she remembered, there was porcelain on every surface in this childless chalet.

Charles was middle-aged, but seemed old by comparison with his infinitely more glamorous brothers. Elisabeth remembered only his beautiful beard and that he had an extremely delicate watch that he produced from a waistcoat pocket. And that, in the manner of elderly relatives, he had given her a golden coin.

But she also remembered with great clarity, and more animation, that Charles had bent down and ruffled her sister’s hair. Her sister Gisela – younger and far, far prettier – always got this kind of attention. Charles had called her his little gypsy, his
bohémienne
.

And that is my oral link to Charles. It is history and yet, when I write it down, it doesn’t feel like much.

And what there is to go on – the number of manservants and the slightly stock story of the gift of a coin – seems held in a sort of melancholic penumbra, though I quite like the detail of the Russian flag. I know that my family were Jewish, of course, and I know they were staggeringly rich, but I really don’t want to get into the sepia saga business, writing up some elegiac Mitteleuropa narrative of loss. And I certainly don’t want to turn Iggie into an old great-uncle in his study, a figure like Bruce Chatwin’s Utz, handing over the family story, telling me: Go, be careful.

It could write itself, I think, this kind of story. A few stitched-together wistful anecdotes, more about the Orient Express, of course, a bit of wandering round Prague or somewhere equally photogenic, some clippings from Google on ballrooms in the Belle Époque. It would come out as nostalgic. And
thin
.

And I’m not entitled to nostalgia about all that lost wealth and glamour from a century ago. And I am not interested in
thin
. I want to know what the relationship has been between this wooden object that I am rolling between my fingers – hard and tricky and Japanese – and where it has been. I want to be able to reach to the handle of the door and turn it and feel it open. I want to walk into each room where this object has lived, to feel the volume of the space, to know what pictures were on the walls, how the light fell from the windows. And I want to know whose hands it has been in, and what they felt about it and thought about it – if they thought about it. I want to know what it has witnessed.

Melancholy, I think, is a sort of default vagueness, a get-out clause, a smothering lack of focus. And this netsuke is a small, tough explosion of exactitude. It deserves this kind of exactitude in return.

All this matters because my job is to make things. How objects get handled, used and handed on is not just a mildly interesting question for me. It is
my
question. I have made many, many thousands of pots. I am very bad at names, I mumble and fudge, but I am good on pots. I can remember the weight and the balance of a pot, and how its surface works with its volume. I can read how an edge creates tension or loses it. I can feel if it has been made at speed or with diligence. If it has warmth.

I can see how it works with the objects that sit nearby. How it displaces a small part of the world around it.

I can also remember if something invited touch with the whole hand or just the fingers, or was an object that asked you to stay away. It is not that handling something is
better
than not handling it. Some things in the world are meant to be looked at from a distance and not fumbled around with. And, as a potter, I find it a bit strange when people who have my pots talk of them as if they are alive: I am not sure if I can cope with the afterlife of what I have made. But some objects do seem to retain the pulse of their making.

This pulse intrigues me. There is a breath of hesitancy before touching or not touching, a strange moment. If I choose to pick up this small white cup with its single chip near the handle, will it figure in my life? A simple object, this cup that is more ivory than white, too small for morning coffee, not quite balanced, could become part of my life of handled things. It could fall away into the territory of personal story-telling; the sensuous, sinuous intertwining of things with memories. A favoured, favourite thing. Or I could put it away. Or I could pass it on.