The Hare with Amber Eyes (25 page)

Viktor has one suitcase. He is wearing the same suit Elisabeth had seen him wear to the railway station in Vienna. She notices that on his watch-chain he still carries the key to the bookcase in the library in the Palais, the bookcase of his early printed books of history.

He is an émigré. His land of
Dichter
and
Denker
, poets and thinkers, had become the land of
Richter
and
Henker
, judges and hangmen.

Viktor lived in Tunbridge Wells with my grandparents and father and uncles in a rented suburban house, called St David’s. A herringbone brick path ran from a wooden gate between two privet hedges up to a porch. It was a sturdy house with gables. There were rose beds and a vegetable garden. It was an ordinary house in an ordinary Kentish town, thirty miles south of London, safe and rather staid.

They went to the Church of King Charles the Martyr for morning service on Sundays. The boys – eight, ten and fourteen years old – were sent to schools where they were not teased for their foreign accents, on the strict instructions of the headmaster. They collected shrapnel and soldiers’ buttons and made elaborate castles and boats out of cardboard. They went for walks in the beech woods at the weekends.

Elisabeth, who had never cooked in her life, learnt to prepare meals. Her former cook, now living in England, sent her letters that ran to pages, with recipes for
Salzburger Nockerln
and schnitzel, and meticulous instructions: ‘the honoured lady slowly
tilts
the frying pan’.

She tutored neighbours’ children in Latin for housekeeping money, and translated to make enough to buy the boys their bicycles, £8 each. She tried to write poetry again, but found she could not. In 1940 she wrote an essay on Socrates and Nazism – three pages of fury – and sent it to her friend the philosopher Eric Voegelin in America. She continued her correspondence with her scattered family. Gisela and Alfredo and her boys were in Mexico. Rudolf was still in small-town Arkansas: he sends her a cutting from
The Paragould Soliphone
about ‘Rudolf Ephrussi, Baron Ephrussi as he would have been in the old country, a long, good-looking lad, teasing the latest tunes out of his saxophone’. Pips and Olga were in Switzerland. Aunt Gerty had escaped from Czechoslavakia and now lived in London, but there was still no news of Elisabeth’s aunt Eva or uncle Jenö, last seen in Kövecses.

Henk, my grandfather, commuted up to London on the 8.18 and was involved in helping to sort out where the Dutch merchant shipping fleet was, and where it should have been.

And Viktor sat in a chair by the kitchen range, the only warm place in the house. He followed the news of the war in
The Times
every day and took the
Kentish Gazette
on Thursdays. He read Ovid, particularly
Tristia,
his poems of exile. When he read, he ran his hand over his face so that the children couldn’t see what the poet did to him. He read for most of the day, apart from a short walk up Blatchington Road and back, and a nap. Occasionally he walked all the way into the centre of the town to Hall’s second-hand bookshop, where the bookseller Mr Pratley was particularly kind to Viktor as he ran his hands along the shelves of Galsworthy, Sinclair Lewis and H. G. Wells.

Sometimes when the boys came back from school he told them about Aeneas and his return to Carthage. There, on the walls, are scenes of Troy. It is only then, confronted by the image of what he has lost, that Aeneas finally weeps.
Sunt lacrimae rerum
, Aeneas says. These are the tears of things, he reads, at the kitchen table as the boys try to finish their algebra, ‘Write a Day in the Life of a Pencil’, note ‘The Dissolution of the Monasteries: Triumph or Tragedy?’

Viktor missed the flat matches that you could buy in Vienna that fitted his waistcoat pocket. He missed his small cigars. He had his black tea in a glass, Russian-style. He poured sugar into it. Once he poured in the family’s ration for the week and stirred it round, as everyone sat open-mouthed.

In February 1944, to everyone’s delight, Iggie turns up in Tunbridge Wells in his American uniform, an intelligence officer with the 7th Corps Headquarters. A childhood switching between English, French and German has made him valuable. Both of the brothers have taken American citizenship to enlist in the army, Rudolf in Virginia in July 1941 and Iggie in California in January 1942, a month after Pearl Harbor.

Iggie during the Normandy campaign, 1944

The next they know of Iggie is a photograph on the front of
The Times
on 27th June 1944, three weeks after the Allied landings in France. It shows the surrender of a German admiral and a German general at Cherbourg. They stand in sodden greatcoats across from a now-slightly-balding Captain I. L. Ephrussi and the dapper American Major General J. Lawton Collins. There are maps of Normandy pinned to the walls, a tidy desk. And everyone is canted slightly forward to catch Iggie’s interpretation of General Collins’s terms.

Viktor died on 12th March 1945, a month before Vienna was liberated by the Russians and two months before the unconditional surrender of the German High Command. He was eighty-four. ‘Born Odessa, Died Tunbridge Wells’ reads his death certificate. Lived, I add as I read it, in Vienna, the centre of Europe. His grave in the municipal cemetery in Charing is far away from his mother’s in Vichy. And far away from his father’s and grandfather’s in the Doric-pillared mausoleum in Vienna, built with all that self-confidence to house the dynastic Ephrussi clan for ever in their new imperial Austrian-Hungarian homeland. It is furthest from Kövecses.

Soon after the war ended Elisabeth received a long letter from uncle Tibor, typed in German. It was sent on from Pips in Switzerland in October. It was on paper that was nearly transparent and it contained dreadful news.

I do not want to repeat everything, but have to write about Jenö and Eva once more. It is terrible to think about the distress under which they died. Jenö already had the certificate in his hand before they were deported from Komarom into the Reich, since he was allowed to go home. He did not want to leave Eva since he believed that they would still be allowed to remain together, but they were immediately separated at the German border and all the better clothes they wore were taken from them too. Both died in January.

Eva, Jewish, had been taken on to the concentration camp at Theresienstadt, where she died of typhus; and Jenö, Gentile, was sent to a labour camp. He died of exhaustion.

Tibor goes on to tell news of neighbours at Kövecses, listing the names of family friends and of cousins of whom I know nothing: Samu, Herr Siebert, the whole Erwin Strasser family, the widow of János Thuróczy, ‘a second son who is missing since this time’ deported during the war or disappeared into the camps. He writes of the devastation around him, the burnt-out villages, the starvation, the inflation. There are no deer left in the countryside. The estate next to Kövecses, Tavarnok, ‘is empty and has burned. Everyone has left, only the old lady is in Topol’čany. I only possess what I am wearing.’

Tibor had been to Vienna to the Palais Ephrussi: ‘In Vienna a few things were saved…The picture of Anna Herz (Makart) is still there, a portrait of Emmy (Angeli) and the picture of Tascha’s mother (I think also Angeli’s), a few pieces of furniture, vases etc. Almost all of your father’s and my books have disappeared, we found a few of them, some with Wassermann’s dedication.’ A few family portraits, a few inscribed books and some furniture. No mention of who is there.

In December 1945 Elisabeth decides that she has to return to Vienna to find out who and what remains. And to rescue the picture of her mother and bring it home.

Elisabeth wrote a novel about her journey. It is unpublished. And unpublishable, I think, as I appraise it in typescript, 261 pages with painstaking Tipp-Exed corrections. The rawness of its emotion makes for uncomfortable reading. In it she appears as a fictionalised Jewish Professor, Kuno Adler, returning to Vienna from America for the first time since leaving at the
Anschluss
.

It is a book about encounters. She writes of her character’s visceral reaction to an official on the train at the border, when asked for a passport:

It was the voice, the intonation that hit a nerve somewhere in Kuno Adler’s throat; no, below the throat, where breath and nourishment plunge into the depths of the body, a non-conscious, ungovernable nerve, in the solar plexus probably. It was the quality of that voice, of that accent, soft and yet rough, ingratiating and slightly vulgar, sensible to the ear as a certain kind of stone is to the touch – the soap-stone that is coarse-grained and spongy and slightly oily on the surface – an Austrian voice. ‘Austrian passport-control.’

The exiled professor arrives at the bombed-out station and wanders, trying to accommodate himself to the squalor, the rapacity of the poor inhabitants and the ruined landmarks. The Opera, the Stock Exchange, the Academy of Fine Arts – all destroyed. St Stephen’s a burnt-out shell.

Outside the Palais Ephrussi the professor stops:

Finally, there he was, on the Ring: the massive pile of the Natural History Museum on his right, the ramp of the Parliament building on his left, beyond it the spire of the Town Hall, and in front of him the railings of the Volksgarten and the Burgplatz. There he was, and there it all was; though the once tree-bordered footpaths across the roadway were stripped, treeless, only a few naked trunks still standing. Otherwise it was all there. And suddenly the dislocation of time which had been dizzying him with illusions and delusions snapped into focus, and he was real, everything was real, incontrovertible fact. He was there. Only the trees were not there, and this comparatively trivial sign of destruction, for which he had not been prepared, caused him incommensurate grief. Hurriedly he crossed the road, entered the park gates, sat down on a bench in a deserted avenue and wept.

Elisabeth’s childhood was spent looking through the canopy of the linden trees in front of the house. In May her bedroom was full of the scent of the flowers.

On 8th December 1945, six and a half years since she was last there, Elisabeth walks into her old home. The enormous gates are hanging off their hinges. It is now the offices of the American occupying authorities: the American Headquarters/Legal Council Property Control Sub-Section. Motorbikes and jeeps are parked in the courtyard. Most panes of the glazed roof are smashed: a bomb had landed on the building next door, destroying much of its façade and taking the Palais’ caryatids, behind which the children had hidden. There are puddles on the floor. Apollo is still there, on his plinth, paused with his lyre.

Elisabeth climbs the thirty-three steps, the family stairs, to the apartment, and she knocks and is shown in by a charming lieutenant from Virginia.

The apartment is now a series of offices, each room with desks and filing cabinets and stenographers. Lists and memoranda are tacked up on the walls. In the library a huge map of occupied Vienna is hanging above the fireplace, with the Russian, American and Allied zones marked in different colours. There is a pall of cigarette-smoke, the sound of talk and typewriters. She is taken around the offices with interest and sympathy and an air of slight disbelief that this – all this – had been a family home. The American office has simply been floated on top of the last Nazi office.

There are a few pictures still on the walls, the
Junge Frauen
in their heavy gilt frames, some studies of Austrian landscapes in mist and the three portraits of Emmy, a grandmother and a great-aunt. The heaviest furniture is still in place, the dining-table and its chairs, a secretaire, wardrobes, beds, the vast armchairs. A few vases. What is still there seems random. Her father’s desk is still there in the library. There are some carpets on the floors. But it is still an empty house. More exactly, it is an
emptied
house.

The boxroom is empty. The mantelpieces are empty. The silver-room is empty and so is the safe. There is no piano. There is no Italian cabinet. No little tables inlaid with mosaic. In the library there are empty shelves. The globes are gone, the clocks are gone, the French chairs are gone. Her mother’s dressing-room is dusty. It contains a filing cabinet.

There is no desk or mirror, but there is a black-lacquer vitrine and it is empty too.

The kindly lieutenant wants to help and is chatty when he finds that Elisabeth studied in New York. Take your time, he says, look around, find what you can. I’m not sure what we can do for you. It is very cold, and he offers her a cigarette and mentions that there is an old lady who still lives here – he waves his hand – who might know more. A corporal is sent off to find the old woman.

Her name is Anna.