19. TYPES OF THE OLD CITY

The children in the dressing-room choose their favourite carving and play with it on the pale-yellow carpet. Gisela loved the Japanese dancer, holding her fan against the brocade gown, caught in mid-step. Iggie loved the wolf, a tight dark tangle of limbs, faint markings all along its flanks, gleaming eyes and a snarl. And he loved the bundle of kindling tied up with rope, and the beggar who has fallen asleep over his begging bowl so that all you see is the top of his bald head. There is also a dried fish, all scales and shrunken eyes, with a small rat scuttling over it proprietorially; its eyes are inlaid jet. And there is the mad old man with his bony back and bulging eyes, gnawing on a fish with an octopus in his other hand. Elisabeth, contrary, loved the masks with their abstracted memory of faces.

You could arrange these carvings, ivory and wood, all the fourteen rats in one long row, the three tigers, the beggars over there, the children, the masks, the shells, the fruits.

You could arrange them by colour, all the way from the dark-brown medlar to the gleaming ivory deer. Or by size. The smallest is the single rat with black inlaid eyes chewing his tail, little bigger than the magenta stamp issued to celebrate the sixtieth year of the Emperor’s reign.

Or you muddled them up, so that your sister can’t find the girl in her brocade robes. Or you could stockade the dog and her puppies with all the tigers, and she would have to get out – and she did. Or you could find the one of the woman washing herself in the wooden bathtub, and the even more intriguing one that looked like a mussel shell, until you opened it up and discovered the man and woman with no clothes on. Or you could scare your brother with the one of the boy trapped in the bell by the witch-snake, with her long black hair trailing round and round.

And you tell stories about these carvings to your mother, and she chooses one and starts a story about it to you. She picks up the netsuke of the child and the mask. She is good with stories.

There are so many that you can never really count them, never know that you have seen them all. And that is the point of these toys in their mirrored cabinet, extending onwards and onwards. They are a complete world, a complete space to play in, until the time comes to put them back again, until Mama is dressed and choosing her fan and her shawl, and then she gives you a goodnight kiss and you have to put the netsuke back now.

They go back into the vitrine, the samurai with the sword half out of the scabbard as the guard at the front, and the small key is turned in the lock of the cabinet. Anna rearranges the fur tippet around Emmy’s neck and fusses at the fall of her sleeves. The nursemaid comes to take you down to the nursery.

And while the netsuke are playthings in this room in Vienna, they are being taken very seriously elsewhere. They are being collected across Europe. The first collections put together by the pioneer collectors are being auctioned for substantial amounts at the Hôtel Drouot. The dealer Siegfried Bing, now a force in Paris with his galleries, Maison de l’Art Nouveau, is putting netsuke into the best possible hands. He is the expert, the writer of prefaces to the sales catalogues of the collections of the late Philippe Burty (140 netsuke), the late Edmond de Goncourt (140 netsuke), the late M. Garie (200 netsuke).

The first German history of netsuke, with illustrations and advice on how to care for them and even how to display them, is published in Leipzig in 1905. The best policy is never to display them at all, and to put them under lock and key and bring them out occasionally. But then, says the author, plaintively, we must have friends to share our interests, friends who can devote a few hours to art. This is not possible in Europe. So if you must have netsuke so that you can see them, then you should have a shallow glass case in which you can put two rows of netsuke, and a mirror or green plush should be placed in the back of the cabinet. Without knowing it, the vitrine in the dressing-room overlooking the Ringstrasse obeys many of the strictures of Herr Albert Brockhaus in his huge and magisterial book. ‘It is advisable,’ he writes:

to keep them from being exposed to dust by putting them into glass cases with glass edges. Dust fills up the holes, makes the raised work coarse, kills the gloss and takes away from the carving a great deal of the charm. When Netsukes are placed together with curios, trinkets and other objects on the mantel pieces, there is a danger of their being broken by careless domestics, swept away, or even carried to an unknown destination in the folds of a woman’s dress upon the occasion of a friendly visit. One of my Netsukes one evening made such a trip unbeknown to the lady who carried it through the streets until she finally discovered it and returned it to me.

The netsuke could not feel safer than they are here. Careless domestics do not last long in Emmy’s Palais: she snaps at the girl who spills the cream jug on the tray. A broken harlequin in the salon means dismissal. In her dressing-room one of the other servants dusts the furniture, but only Anna is allowed to open the vitrine for the children, before she lays out her mistress’s clothes for the evening.

The netsuke are no longer part of salon life, no longer part of a game of sharpened wit. No one is going to comment on the quality of their carving or the pallor of their patina. They have lost any connection to Japan, lost their japonisme, are suspended from critique. They have become true toys, true bibelots: they are not so small when they are picked up by a child. Here, in this dressing-room, they are part of the intimacy of Emmy’s life. This is the space where she undresses with the help of Anna, and dresses for the next engagement with Viktor, a friend, a lover. It has its own kind of threshold.

The longer Emmy lives with the netsuke and sees her children playing with them, the more she realises that they are too intimate a gift to have on display. Her closest friend, Marianne Gutmann, has a few of these netsuke – eleven, to be exact – but only in her country house. They have laughed about them together. But how could you explain the sheer number of these unconventional and rather overwhelming foreign carvings to the ladies from the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde committee – all wearing a small dark ribbon on their dress – who gather to help Galician girls from the shtetls get honest jobs. It would be impossible.

It is April again and I am back in the Palais. I look out of the window of Emmy’s dressing-room through the bare branches of the lindens, past the Votivkirche, along Währinger Strasse, and it is the fifth turning to Dr Freud’s house at Berggasse 19, where he is writing up the notes on Emmy’s late great-aunt Anna von Lieben as the case of Cäcilie M., a woman with a ‘hysterical psychosis of denial’, severe facial pains and memory lapses, sent to him ‘because no one knew what do with her’. For five years she had been in his care, talking so much that he had to persuade her to start writing: she was his Lehrmeisterin, his professor in the study of hysteria.

There are all the cases and cases of antiquities behind his back, as he writes. Rosewood and mahogany and Biedermeier vitrines with wooden shelves and glass shelves, with Etruscan mirrors and Egyptian scarabs and mummy portraits and Roman death-masks, wreathed in cigar smoke. I realise at this point that I am beginning to obsess hopelessly about what is fast becoming my very special subject, the vitrines of the fin de siècle. On Freud’s desk is a netsuke in the form of a shishi, a lion.

My time-management skills are seriously awry. I spent a week reading Adolf Loos on Japanese style as the ‘abandonment of symmetry’, and how it flattens objects and people: they ‘depict flowers, but they are pressed flowers’. I find that he designed the Secessionist exhibition of 1900, which included a huge collection of Japanese artefacts. Japan, I think, is inescapable in Vienna.

Then I decided that I needed to look at the polemical Karl Kraus in detail. I bought a copy of Die Fackel from an antiquarian bookshop in order to look at the particular colour of its cover. It was red, as any fierce, satirical magazine calling itself The Torch should be. But I worried that the red had faded over ninety years.

I keep hoping that the netsuke will be a key that unlocks the whole of Viennese intellectual life. I worry that I am becoming a Casaubon, and will spend my life writing lists and notes. I know that the Viennese intelligentsia like puzzling objects, and that looking intensely at one thing is a particular pleasure. At the moment that this vitrine is being opened every night by the children as Emmy dresses, Loos is agonising over the design of a salt-cellar, Kraus is obsessing over an advert in the newspaper, a phrase from an editorial in Die Neue Zeitung, Freud about a slip of the tongue. But there is no escaping the facts that Emmy is not a reader of Adolf Loos, that she managed to dislike Klimt (‘a bear with the manners of a bear’) and Mahler (‘a racket’), and that she did not buy anything from the Wiener Werkstätte at all (‘tat’). She ‘never took us to an exhibition’, says my grandmother’s memoir.

I do know that in 1910 small things, fragments, are very now, and Emmy is very Viennese. What does she think of the netsuke? She has not collected them, she is not going to add to them. There are other things, of course, to pick up and move around in Emmy’s world. There are the bibelots in the drawing-room, the Meissen cups and saucers, bits of Russian silver and malachite on the mantelpieces. This is amateur stuff for the Ephrussi, background noise to go with the putti hovering like plump partridges overhead, not like aunt Béatrice Ephrussi-Rothschild commissioning clocks from Fabergé for her villa in Cap Ferrat.

Emmy, however, loves stories, and the netsuke are small, quick, ivory stories. She is thirty: it is only twenty years since she was in a nursery further round the Ringstrasse, her mother reading her fairy stories of her own. Today she reads the lower part of the Neue Freie Presse, the daily feuilleton.

Above the ruled line is the news, the news from Budapest, the latest pronouncement from the mayor Dr Karl Lueger, the Herrgott von Wien, the Lord God of Vienna. Below the fold is the feuilleton. Every day there is a charmingly phrased and sonorous essay. It could be on the opera or operetta, or about a particular building that is being demolished. It could be an arch memorialising of folk characters from old Vienna. Frau Sopherl, the Nachsmarkt seller of fruit, Herr Adabei the gossip-monger, walk-on parts in a Potemkin city. Every day there it is, mild and narcissistic, one filigree phrase twining around another, as adjectivally sweet as Demel’s pastries. Herzl, who starts out writing them, talked of the feuilletonist ‘falling in love with his own spirit, and thus of losing any standard of judging himself or others’, and you can see this happening. They are so perfect, a riff of humour, a throwaway, glancing look at Vienna, ‘a matter of injecting experience – as it were, intravenously – with the poison of sensation…the feuilletonist turns this to account. He renders the city strange to its inhabitants,’ in the words of Walter Benjamin. In Vienna the feuilletonist renders the city back to itself as a perfect, sensationalised fiction.

I think of the netsuke as part of this Vienna. Many of the netsuke are Japanese feuilletons in themselves. They depict the kind of Japanese characters written about in lyrical laments by visitors to Japan. Lafcadio Hearn, an American-Greek journalist, writes about them in Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, Gleanings in Buddha-Fields and Shadowings, each short glimpse or gleaning essay a poetic evocation: ‘the cries of the earliest itinerant vendors begin – “Daikoyai! kabuya-kabu!” – the sellers of daikon and other strange vegetables. “Moyaya-moya!” – the plaintive call of the women who sell thin slips of kindling-wood for the lighting of charcoal fires.’

In the vitrine in Emmy’s dressing-room are the barrel-maker framed by the arc of his half-finished barrel; the street-wrestlers in a sweaty, tumbling embrace of dark chestnut wood; the old, drunk monk with his robes awry; the servant girl cleaning the floor; the rat-catcher with his basket open. When picked out and held, the netsuke are Types of Old Edo, just like the Types of the Old City who walk onto Vienna’s stage every day below the ruled line in the Neue Freie Presse.

As they sit on their green velvet shelves in Emmy’s dressing-room, these daily feuilletons are doing what Vienna likes to do, telling stories about itself.

And fractious as this beautiful woman in this absurd pink Palais is, she can glance out of her window into the Schottengasse and start a story for her children about the elderly driver of the shabby fiacre, the flower-seller and the student. The netsuke are now part of a childhood, part of the children’s world of things. This world is made of things they can touch and things they cannot touch. There are things that they can touch sometimes and things they can touch every day. There are things that are theirs, for ever, and things that are theirs but that will be passed on to a sister or brother.

The children are not allowed into the silver-room where the footmen polish the silver, and they are not allowed into the dining-room if there is going to be a dinner. They must not touch their father’s glass in its silver holder, out of which he drinks black tea à la Russe – it was grandfather’s. Lots of things in the Palais were grandfather’s, but this is special. Father’s books are placed on the library table when they arrive from Frankfurt and London and Paris in their brown paper parcels tied up with string. They are not allowed to touch the sharp silver paper-knife that also lies there. Later they are given the stamps from the parcels for their album.

There are things in this world that the children hear, but whose sounds oscillate below an adult’s sense of pitch. They hear the green-and-gold clock in the salon (which has mermaids on it) tick every slow second as they sit in starched immobility during visits from great-aunts. They can hear the shuffle of the carriage horses in the courtyard, which means they are finally off to the park. There is the sound of the rain on the glass roof over the courtyard, which means they are not.

There are things that the children smell that are part of their landscape: the smell of their father’s cigar smoke in the library, their mother, or the smell of schnitzel on covered dishes as it is carried past the nursery for lunch. The smell behind the itchy tapestries in the dining-room when they creep behind them to hide. And the smell of hot chocolate after skating. Emmy makes this for them sometimes. Chocolate is brought in on a porcelain dish, and then they are allowed to break it into pieces the size of a krone and these dark shards are melted in a little silver saucepan by Emmy over a purple flame. Then, when it is glaucous, warm milk is poured over it and sugar stirred in.

There are things that they see with complete clarity – the clarity of an object seen through a lens. There are also things that they see as a blur: the corridors chased along, corridors that go on for ever, one gilded flash of a picture after another, one marble table after another. There are eighteen doors if you run all the way round the courtyard corridor.

The netsuke have moved from a world of Gustave Moreau in Paris to the world of a Dulac children’s book in Vienna. They build their own echoes, they are part of those Sunday mornings’ story-telling, part of The Arabian Nights, the travels of Sinbad the Sailor and the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. They are locked into their vitrine, behind the dressing-room door, which is along the corridor and up the long stairs from the courtyard, which is behind the double oak doors with the porter waiting, which is in the fairytale castle of a Palais on a street that is part of The Thousand and One Nights.