The Hare with Amber Eyes (32 page)

Does it start here on the edge of the sea? Perhaps that up-and-off entrepreneurial spirit is Odessan; their vagabonding after old books or Dürer or adventures in love or the next good grain deal. Odessa is certainly a good place to ship out from. You can turn east or you can turn west. It is wry, avid, polyglot.

It is a good place to change your name. ‘Jewish names are unpleasant to the ear’: this is where their grandmother Balbina became Belle, and where their grandfather Chaim became Joachim, and then Charles Joachim. This is where Eizak became Ignace and where Leib became Léon. And Efrussi became Ephrussi. This is where the memory of Berdichev, the shtetl in the eastern Ukraine on the edge of Poland where Chaim came from, was walled up behind the pale-yellow plaster of their first Palais on the promenade.

This is where they became the Ephrussi from Odessa.

This is a good place to put something in your pocket and start a journey. I want to go to see what the sky looks like in Berdichev, but I have to go home. From the chestnut trees outside the house I look out for a conker to put in my pocket. I walk the whole promenade twice, but I am a month too late with this as well. They have gone. I hope some children have picked them up.

As I fly home from Odessa I feel exhausted by the whole year. I correct myself. It is not a single year, it has become close to two years of looking at the scribbles in the margins of books, the letters used as bookmarks, the photographs of nineteenth-century cousins, the Odessan patents of this and that, the envelopes at the backs of drawers with their few sad aerogrammes. Two years of tracing routes across cities, an old map in one hand, lost.

My fingers are tacky from old papers and from dust. My father keeps finding things. How can he keep finding things in his tiny flat in his courtyard of retired clergymen? He has just found a diary in unreadable German from the 1870s that I need to get translated. A week goes by in an archive and all I have is a list of unread newspapers, a note to look up some correspondence, a question mark about Berlin. My studio is full of novels and books on
japonisme
, and I miss my children and I haven’t made any porcelain for months and months. I’m anxious about what I’ll make when I finally sit down at my wheel with a lump of clay.

A few days in Odessa and now there are more questions than before. Where did Gorky buy his netsuke? What was the library like in Odessa in the 1870s? Berdichev was destroyed in the war, but perhaps I should go there too and see what it looks like. Conrad came from Berdichev: perhaps I should read Conrad. Did he write about dust?

My tiger netsuke comes from Tamba, a village in the mountains west of Kyoto. I remember an endless bus journey thirty years ago to visit an old potter on a dusty street straggling up a hillside. Perhaps I should trace my tiger home. There must be a cultural history of dust.

My notebook is made up of lists of lists.
Yellow / Gold / Red /
Yellow armchair / Yellow cover
Gazette
/ Yellow Palais / Golden lacquer box / Titian gold Louise’s hair / Renoir:
La Bohémienne
/ Vermeer’s View of Delft.

My competent brother is home already. In Prague airport, where I change planes and have three hours to kill, I sit with my notebooks and a bottle of beer, and then another, and worry about Berdichev. I remember that Charles, that graceful dancer, was called
le Polonais
, the Pole, both by his brother Ignace and by the dandy Robert de Montesquiou, a great friend of Proust’s. And that Painter, the early biographer of Proust, picked this up and made Charles barbarous and uncouth. I thought he had simply got it wrong. Perhaps, I think over my beer, he was making a point about where you start from: Poland, not Russia. I realise that in all my enthusiasm about tactile responses to Odessa I have mislaid its reputation as a city of pogroms, a city you might wish to leave behind.

And I have the slightly clammy feeling of biography, the sense of living on the edges of other people’s lives without their permission. Let it go. Let it lie. Stop looking and stop picking things up, the voice says insistently. Just go home and leave these stories be.

But leaving be is hard. I remember the hesitancies when talking to Iggie in old age; hesitancies that trembled into silences, silences that marked places of loss. I remember Charles in his final illness, and the death of Swann and the opening of his heart like a vitrine, his taking out one memory after another. ‘Even when one is no longer attached to things, it’s still something to have been attached to them; because it was always for reasons which other people didn’t grasp…’ There are the places in memory you do not wish to go with others. In the 1960s, my grandmother Elisabeth, so assiduous in her letter-writing, such an advocate for the letter (‘write again, write more fully’), burnt the hundreds of letters and notes she had received from her poetic grandmother Evelina.

Not ‘Who would be interested?’ But ‘Don’t come near this. This is private.’

In very old age she would not talk of her mother at all. She would talk about politics and French poetry. She did not mention Emmy until she was surprised by a photograph falling out of her prayer book. My father picked it up and she, matter-of-factly, told him that it was one of her mother’s lovers and started to talk about the difficulty of those love-affairs, how compromised she felt by them. And then silence again. There is something about that burning of all those letters that gives me pause: why should everything be made clear and be brought into the light? Why keep things, archive your intimacies? Why not let thirty years of shared conversation go spiralling in ash up into the air of Tunbridge Wells? Just because you have it does not mean you have to pass it on. Losing things can sometimes gain you a space in which to live. I don’t miss Vienna, Elisabeth would say, with a lightness in her voice. It was claustrophobic. It was very dark.

She was over ninety when she mentioned that she had received rabbinical instruction as a child: ‘I asked my father for permission. He was surprised.’ She was matter-of-fact, as if I already knew.

When she died two years later my father, the clergyman in the Church of England, born in Amsterdam with a childhood everywhere in Europe, stood in his Benedictine-black, rabbinical-black cassock and recited the Kaddish for his mother in the parish church near her nursing home.

The problem is that I am in the wrong century to burn things. I am the wrong generation to let it go. I think of a library carefully sorted into boxes. I think of all those careful burnings by others, the systematic erasing of stories, the separations between people and their possessions, and then of people from their families and families from their neighbourhoods. And then from their country.

I think of someone checking a list to make sure that these people were still alive and resident in Vienna, before stamping ‘Sara’ or ‘Israel’ in red over the record of their birth. I think, of course, of all the listings of families in the manifests, for deportations.

If others can be so careful over things that are so important, then I must be careful over these objects and their stories. I must get it right, go back and check it again, walk it again.

‘Don’t you think those netsuke should stay in Japan?’ said a stern neighbour of mine in London. And I find I am shaking as I answer, because this matters.

I tell her that there are plenty of netsuke in the world, sitting in velvet-lined trays in dealers’ cabinets off Bond Street or Madison Avenue, Keizersgracht or the Ginza. Then I get a bit side-tracked onto the Silk Road, and then onto Alexander the Great’s coins still being in circulation in the Hindu Kush in the nineteenth century. I tell her about travelling with my partner Sue in Ethiopia, and finding an old Chinese jar covered in dust in a market town and trying to work out how it had got there.

No, I answer. Objects have always been carried, sold, bartered, stolen, retrieved and lost. People have always given gifts. It is how you tell their stories that matters.

It is the counterpart of the question that I am often asked: ‘Don’t you hate to see things leave your studio?’ Well, no, I don’t hate it. I make my living from letting things go. You just hope, if you make things as I do, that they can make their way in the world and have some longevity.

It is not just things that carry stories with them. Stories are a kind of thing, too. Stories and objects share something, a patina. I thought I had this clear, two years ago before I started, but I am no longer sure how this works. Perhaps patina is a process of rubbing back so that the essential is revealed, the way that a striated stone tumbled in a river feels irreducible, the way that this netsuke of a fox has become little more than a memory of a nose and a tail. But it also seems additive, in the way that a piece of oak furniture gains over years and years of polishing, and the way the leaves of my medlar shine.

You take an object from your pocket and put it down in front of you and you start. You begin to tell a story.

When I hold them I find myself looking for the wear, the fine cracks that run alongside the grain of some of the ivories. It is not just that I want the split in these wrestlers – a tangle of hopelessly thrashing ivory limbs – to have come from being been dropped onto Charles’s golden carpet of the winds by someone famous (a poet, a painter, Proust) in a moment of grand
fin-de-siècle
excitement. Or that the deeply ingrained dust lodged under the wings of a cicada resting on a walnut shell comes from being hidden in a Viennese mattress. It probably doesn’t.

The collection’s latest resting-place is in London. The Victoria and Albert Museum is getting rid of some of its old vitrines to make way for new displays. I buy one.

Because my work as a potter is seen as minimalist – rows of pale celadon blue-grey porcelain vessels – it is assumed that my wife and our three children live in some temple to minimalism, with a concrete floor perhaps, or a wall of glass, some Danish furniture. We don’t. We live in an Edwardian house in a pleasant London street with plane trees out the front, and a hall that contained – this morning – a cello and a French horn, some wellington boots, a wooden fort that the boys have outgrown and that has been on its way to a charity shop for three months, a heap of coats and shoes, and Ella, our aged, loved gun-dog – beyond the hall it gets messy. But I want our three kids to have the chance to get to know the netsuke as those children did a hundred years ago.

So, with great effort, we haul in this decommissioned vitrine. It takes four of us and a lot of swearing. It is seven feet high on its mahogany base and is made of bronze. It has three glass shelves. It is only as it is being fixed to the wall that I remember my own childhood collections. I collected bones, a mouse skin, shells, a tiger’s claw, the sloughed scales of a snake, clay pipes and oyster shells, and Victorian pennies from the archaeological dig that my elder brother John and I started one summer in Lincoln, forty years ago, marking out the ground with string into a grid before getting bored. My father was Chancellor of the Cathedral and we lived opposite its great Gothic east window in the Chancery, a medieval house with a spiral staircase and a chapel at the very end of a long corridor. An archdeacon in the Close passed on his collection of fossils dug up during an Edwardian childhood in Norfolk, some still marked with the day and place they were found. When I was seven the cathedral library was getting rid of mahogany cases, and so half my room was taken over by a vitrine – my first – in which I would arrange and rearrange my objects, turn the key and open up the case on request. It was my
Wunderkammer
, my world of things, my secret history of touch.

This latest vitrine I think will be a good place for the netsuke. It is next to the piano, and unlocked so that the children can open the door if they wish to.

I put some of the netsuke out on display – the wolf, the medlar, the hare with amber eyes, a dozen more – and when I next look they have been moved around. A rat, curled up asleep, has been pushed to the front. I open the glass door and pick it up. I slip it into my pocket, put the dog on the lead and leave for work. I have pots to make.

The netsuke begin again.

This book has been long in its gestation. I first told this story in 2005 and thank you to the three people, Michael Goldfarb, Joe Earle and Christopher Benfey, who told me to stop talking and start writing.

Firstly, I want to thank my brother Thomas for his great encouragement, his practical help and his companionship. My uncle and aunt Constant and Julia de Waal have been very supportive throughout. Thank you to all those who have helped with research and translation, in particular Georgina Wilson, Hannah James, Tom Otter, Susannah Otter, Chantal Riekel and Aurogeeta Das. Dr Jo Catling of the University of East Anglia has been invaluable for her work on the Rilke/Ephrussi papers and Mark Hinton of Christie’s was a great help in elucidating signatures on the netsuke. Carys Davis, my studio manager, has kept the world at bay, and been a tremendous interlocutor day by day.

I would like to thank Giselle de Bogarde Scantlebury, the late Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, Francis Spufford, Jenny Turner, Madeleine Bessborough, Anthony Sinclair, Brian Dillon, James Harding, Lydia Syson, Mark Jones, A. S. Byatt, Charles Saumerez-Smith, Ruth Saunders, Amanda Renshaw, Tim Barringer, Jorunn Veiteberg, Rosie Thomas, Vikram Seth and Joram ten Brink. I am particularly grateful to Martina Margetts, Philip Watson and Fiona MacCarthy, all of whom have kept faith with this book.

Thank you to the staff at the London Library, the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the British Library, Cambridge University Library, Courtauld Institute, Goethe Institute, Musée d’Orsay, Louvre, Bibliothèque Nationale, National Library Tokyo, Israelitische Kultusgemeinde, and the Adler Society of Vienna. In Vienna, I would like to thank Sophie Lillie for all her pioneering work on restitution, to Anna Staudacher and Wolf-Erich Eckstein at the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde, to Georg Gaugusch and Christopher Wentworth-Stanley for help on genealogies, and thanks go to Martin Drschka of Casinos Austria for his welcome to the Palais Ephrussi. In Odessa, Mark Naidorf, Anna Misyuk and Alexander (Sasha) Rozenboim guided me through some of the history of the Efrussi.

Felicity Bryan has been the most wonderful agent and encourager. I want to record my gratitude to her and her colleagues at the Felicity Bryan Agency, and to Zoe Pagnamenta, and all the staff at Andrew Nurnberg Associates. I’d also like to thank Juliet Brooke and Kate Bland at Chatto. Jonathan Galassi at Farrar, Straus and Giroux has been a marvellous advocate from the start.

I have been overwhelmed by the care, dedication and imagination which my two editors have taken. Clara Farmer at Chatto wrote to me asking if the book existed. She and Courtney Hodell at FSG have made this book happen and I am deeply indebted to them both.

Above all I want to record my love and gratitude to my late grandmother Elisabeth and my late great-uncle Iggie, to my mother Esther de Waal, to my father Victor de Waal and to Jiro Sugiyama.

I could not have written this book without the sustaining generosity of my wife Sue Chandler. It is for our children Ben, Matthew and Anna.