The Hare With Amber Eyes
“‘A NEVER-TO-BE-REPEATED OPPORTUNITY’ How can I write about this time? I read memoirs, the journals of Musil, look at the photographs of the crowds on this day, the following day, the day after that. I read the Vienna newspapers. On Tuesday the Hermansky bakery is baking Aryan bread. On Wednesday Jewish lawyers are sacked. On Thursday non-Aryans are excluded from the football club Schwarz-Rot. Goebbels gives out free radios on Friday. Aryan razor blades are on sale.
I have Viktor’s passport with its stamps and a thin shake of letters between members of the family, and I put these out on my long desk. I read them again and again, willing them to tell me what it was like, what Viktor and Emmy feel as they sit in their house on the Ring. I have folders of notes from the archives. But I realise that I can’t do this from London, from a library. So I go back to Vienna, to the Palais.
I stand on the balcony of the second floor. I have bought a netsuke back with me, the pale-brown one of three... chestnuts with the small white grub in ivory, and I realise that I’m worrying away at it in my pocket, tumbling it round and round.MoreLess
I have Viktor’s passport with its stamps and a thin shake of letters between members of the family, and I put these out on my long desk. I read them again and again, willing them to tell me what it was like, what Viktor and Emmy feel as they sit in their house on the Ring. I have folders of notes from the archives. But I realise that I can’t do this from London, from a library. So I go back to Vienna, to the Palais.
I stand on the balcony of the second floor. I have bought a netsuke back with me, the pale-brown one of three... chestnuts with the small white grub in ivory, and I realise that I’m worrying away at it in my pocket, tumbling it round and round.MoreLess
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