The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss Read online

  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.

  How objects are handed on is all about story-telling. I am giving you this because I love you. Or because it was given to me. Because I bought it somewhere special. Because you will care for it. Because it will complicate your life. Because it will make someone else envious. There is no easy story in legacy. What is remembered and what is forgotten? There can be a chain of forgetting, the rubbing away of previous ownership as much as the slow accretion of stories. What is being passed on to me with all these small Japanese objects?

  I realise that I’ve been living with this netsuke business for too long. I can either anecdotalise it for the rest of my life – my odd inheritance from a beloved elderly relative – or go and find out what it means. One evening I find myself at a dinner telling some academics what I know of the story, and feel slightly sickened by how poised it sounds. I hear myself entertaining them, and the story echoes back in their reactions. It isn’t just getting smoother, it is getting thinner. I must sort it out now or it will disappear.

  Being busy is no excuse. I have just finished an exhibition of my porcelain in a museum and can postpone a commission for a collector, if I play my cards right. I have negotiated with my wife and cleared my diary. Three or four months should see me right. That gives me enough time to go back to see Jiro in Tokyo and to visit Paris and Vienna.

  As my grandmother and my great-uncle Iggie have died, I must also ask for my father’s help to get started. He is eighty and kindness itself and will look out family things for me, he says, for background information. He seems delighted that one of his four sons is interested. There isn’t much, he warns me. He comes down to my studio with a small cache of photographs, forty-odd. He also brings two thin blue files of letters to which he has added yellow Post-it notes, mostly legible, a family tree annotated by my grandmother sometime in the 1970s, the membership book for the Wiener Club in 1935 and, in a supermarket carrier bag, a pile of Thomas Mann novels with inscriptions. We lay them out on the long table in my office up the stairs, above the room where I fire my pots in the kilns. You are now the keeper of the family archive, he tells me, and I look at the piles and am not sure how funny I should find this.

  I ask, somewhat desperately, if there is any more material. He looks again that evening in his small flat in the courtyard of retired clergymen where he lives. He telephones me to say that he has found another volume of Thomas Mann. This journey is going to be more complicated than I had thought.

  Still, I can’t start with a complaint. I know very little of substance about Charles, the first collector of the netsuke, but I have found where he lived in Paris. I put a netsuke in my pocket and set out.

  Part One

  PARIS 1871–1899

  1. LE WEST END

  One sunny April day I set out to find Charles. Rue de Monceau is a long Parisian street bisected by the grand boulevard Malesherbes that charges off towards the boulevard Pereire. It is a hill of golden stone houses, a series of hotels playing discreetly on neoclassical themes, each a minor Florentine palace with heavily rusticated ground floors and an array of heads, caryatids and cartouches. Number 81 rue de Monceau, the Hôtel Ephrussi, where my netsuke start their journey, is near the top of the hill. I pass the headquarters of Christian Lacroix and then, next door,
there it is. It is now, rather crushingly, an office for medical insurance.

  It is utterly beautiful. As a boy I used to draw buildings like this, spending afternoons carefully inking in shadows so that you could see the rise and fall of the depth of the windows and pillars. There is something musical in this kind of elevation. You take classical elements and try to bring them into rhythmic life: four Corinthian pilasters rising up to pace the façade, four massive stone urns on the parapet, five storeys high, eight windows wide. The street level is made up of great blocks of stone worked to look as if they have been weathered. I walk past a couple of times and, on the third, notice that there is the double back-to-back E of the Ephrussi family incorporated into the metal grilles over the street windows, the tendrils of the letters reaching into the spaces of the oval. It is barely there. I try to work out this rectitude and what it says about their confidence. I duck through the passageway to a courtyard, then through another arch to a stable block of red brick with servants’ quarters above; a pleasing diminuendo of materials and textures.

  A delivery man carries boxes of Speedy-Go Pizza into the medical insurers. The door into the entrance hall is open. I walk into the hall, its staircase curling up like a coil of smoke through the whole house, black cast iron and gold filigree stretching up to a lantern at the top. There is a marble urn in a deep niche, chequerboard marble tiles. Executives are coming down the stairs, heels hard on marble, and I retreat in embarrassment. How can I start to explain this idiotic quest? I stand in the street and watch the house and take some photographs, apologetic Parisians ducking past me. House-watching is an art. You have to develop a way of seeing how a building sits in its landscape or streetscape. You have to discover how much room it takes up in the world, how much of the world it displaces. Number 81, for instance, is a house that cannily disappears into its neighbours: there are other houses that are grander, some are plainer, but few are more discreet.