Alva and Irva

by Edward Carey

  MOTHER, STANDING on bathroom scales watching herself grow, was fascinated, though a little fearful, of her new shape: of what her body factory was producing down there, under the skin. Father, who was invited into the bathroom to note Mother’s biological progress through the increasingly large numbers the arrow indicated, was visibly appalled. When the swelling of her figure was first noticeable he pretended that Mother had been overeating, for it was an unassuming sort of swelling then—a swelling that seemed to mind its own business. But when the protuberance began to take on monstrous proportions, and when its every moment called people’s attention to it, and when Mother was forced to adjust the way she walked and sat and moved, then his only desire was to take hold of this immodest extremity and push it back inside Mother until it was out of sight.

  Leaving the bathroom Mother and Father entered the largest room of their home—this room was bedroom, kitchen, sitting room, dining room, dressing room, storeroom. This room was not even a particularly large room, yet the collected possessions of Mother and father fitted easily enough within it. This room had two windows, one of which looked across Napoleon Street to various police buildings. Their home, a building divided into many small flats, was called Sirkin House. What a tiny little place their fraction of it must have been. Pokey-home. Poxy-home. How inappropriate it is that their love, so huge a thing as it felt to them, could fit within so paltry a container. A thousand, thousand rooms, a palace the size of Versailles in France would have seemed a little more adequate to house the limitlessness of their adoration. But love, how extraordinary this is, does not generally require large quantities of space.

  AS MOTHER GREW, and as her growth seemed larger than any of the other growths to be found emerging from the pregnant women of our city, Father began to suspect that the removal of the growth would cause Mother some considerable pain. The previous year, Father recalled, he had trapped one of his fingers as he was pulling up some floorboards in the attic of an abandoned building on Foundry Lane, and the finger, once freed, had become unpleasantly large. And to relieve his finger of that largeness, for it looked as if it belonged not to puny father but to some improbable giant, he had pricked it with a needle. And had it hurt? Yes, certainly it had hurt. But then after the pain and after the pus rushed out of him, his finger felt a little better. Sore but better, but only after the pain. And this pain was centred only on a tiny part of himself, on a finger, so how would the pain be if the swelling distorted the whole body? Father looked at sleeping mother lying on her back, watching the volcano of her belly hidden underneath the sheets, and he began to weep. He crept away from the bed, anxious not to wake Mother, anxious not to disturb the volcano. He shut himself in the bathroom and between heavy sobs rolled and lit himself a soggy cigarette.

  So I consider Father now while it’s still possible, for regretfully it must be reported that there’s little time left for him. There he sits, still enough for examination, on his lavatory seat. As Father smokes his cigarette, there’s time to think a little more of this inhaling and exhaling father of ours who was a father-never-to-be.

  Father, who were you beyond stamp-licker, post office step-sitter, impregnator?

  Our father, Orphan Linas, Linas the Potent, was one of those people who seemed to understand suffering. A child’s scream after it has fallen over; an old man hauling in his breath; the everyday bravery a fat woman uses to sit down: the sadness of these things deprived him of sleep.

  Sometimes the pain he would see exhibiting itself every day on the city streets would dry up his movement and would stand him rigid, clenched in sorrow. To think that pain was so ordinary, so widespread, that pain was everywhere, that it was impossible to walk out into the streets without witnessing it. How could Father live with this knowledge? I imagine Father now, not atop his lavatory bowl but standing still on a street pavement, the weak engine of his body stalled. His huge eyes are evidence of his sensitivity. His pale skin is so thin you feel you could easily stroke it off. I imagine his eyebrows permanently high on his great forehead, so easily is he surprised, so easily is he distressed. People passing him standing motionless in the street, halted by other people’s pain, may think, ‘How will his heart last?’ Oh, Father was not a good design, rather he was a failure of nature, a whim perhaps that was not meant to survive long. So large a face, so sad and so timid, but somehow, perhaps because of the honest intensity of its expression, so handsome.

  But this night, which I return to now, this night as Father sits on the lavatory seat, he has wept the sorrow out of himself, letting it drip down his face, into his lap, onto his cigarette. With a hiss his cigarette has sighed out of life, and he moves now off his lavatory perch and back into the room where his pregnant wife sleeps on.

  SO NOW FATHER, in search of comfort, turns his mind elsewhere. In his leather satchel, which is locked, even from Mother, is a small part of Father’s prodigious collection of foreign stamps. The other stamps, a vast hoard, are secreted away underneath the rotting floorboards of the attic of the abandoned house on Foundry Lane with the dangerous, finger-pinching floorboards. Father collects his satchel and returns to the bathroom and from there he journeys around the world.

  With the speed it takes him to place each foreign-stamped envelope in front of the last, he travels from city to city, from continent to continent. He thinks little of crossing from one end of Europe to the other in a second, nor is he impressed, as his fingers pass from envelope to envelope, that he has just strode the enormity of the Atlantic. What does he care for that, he who can traverse the length of long Siberia between breaths, while we lesser beings leave Moscow and take five weeks to arrive in Vladivostok and step onto the railway platform exhausted and angry. Watch him sniff and kiss those stamps. His fingers, his eyes, his lips do all the travelling. This childish man, who is our father, is attempting to breathe in, to see, to feel all the smells, sights and touches of the world in one greedy instant.

  Father, who would never travel beyond our country’s borders, was fascinated by the world. So what, thought father, if the stamps had been franked, if their innocence had been deprived them, so what when they had come from a foreign country, when it was a foreign person, whose life Father struggled to comprehend, who performed the franking. And he often wondered: What is the taste of foreign stamp glue?

  Father had stolen every stamp in his foreign stamp collection. He stole them from work, from the post office. He stole the international post. If an envelope came to our city with AIR MAIL or PAR AVION proudly written on it, it may just as well have said MAIL FOR LINAS.

  True, Father was really only interested in the stamps—he paid little attention to the envelopes. But how could he deliver letters with the stamps missing—what would people say to that? What excuse could he possibly give? No, he could not risk delivery, so he kept the letters to himself. Though he loved only the stamps, he kept the envelopes as well. At first he believed he would deliver all the foreign letters in time, that he was just holding onto them for as long as his love of the stamps lasted. But his love for the stamps would not be sated, it would not be tamed.

  Sometimes of course there would be complaints that certain letters had not arrived, but such losses could be easily explained: it was due, of course, with apologies, to the lamentable state of the mail service. The missing letters were placed on a list in Grandfather’s office. Letters have a habit of getting lost, it’s just one of the hazards of sending mail. International mail is particularly problematic. At first nobody noticed that the complaints concerning missing letters all came from the district of the city where only Father delivered the mail. Until one particular letter failed to arrive.

  IT DIDN’T REALLY matter that Mirgarita Gavala’s letter from her son in Valencia, Spain (with a light-blue stamp—labelled España—of King Juan Carlos II at a value of eight pesetas), didn’t arrive—she didn’t suppose that the boy would be so considerate as to write to his ailing mother anyway. It didn’t really matter that the response to a shea
f of poems the poet Angel Berg had sent off to a publishing house in London, England (with a ten-and-a-half pence stamp of the Abbey and Palace of Holyroodhouse, and with the outline of the head of Queen Elizabeth II in the top right-hand corner), never turned up because the letter was a rejection anyway. But it was a shame that the cog sent in a little brown cardboard box all the way from Zurich, Switzerland (with two stamps, both labelled Helvetica: the first, the most colourful, for two francs, celebrating 800 Jahre of the Stadt Luzern; the second for seven francs, saying Championnat du monde de Dressage Lausanne), which would have been able to fix the ancestral and beautiful antique clock of Marian Stashak in time for his father Maurice’s eightieth birthday, never appeared. In any case there was little trauma caused by all these failed intentions that had embarked so optimistically (or not) from all those distant buildings, those distant hands and lands. Since their arrival may not have been expected, their absence often caused no tears, and people continued their quiet or noisy days unaware of the information that had been stolen from them for the sake of various colourful or monochrome rectangles of paper. But then someone in one of the smaller of the governmental offices missed a letter that he was certain should have arrived and reported the absence with a swiftness that betrayed how new he was to his position.

  Ambras Cetts, for such was the young man’s name, will go far, and the more we want him to fail (for his eagerness has deeply offended) the higher he will rise.5

  The letter Ambras Cetts registered as missing did not even contain any particularly important information. To be precise it boasted the official results of a recreational pistol match held at a shooting gallery in Vienna, Austria, between various civil servants from various civic authorities who were assembled in that city for seminars on the rise of vermin internationally, specifically on that menace Rattus rattus. (The stamp was for four schillings and was pink and labelled Republik Österreich and was of someone called Almsee.) Our country on that occasion was represented by a certain A. J. Cetts who would not have been interested in this missing piece of trivia had it not been for the fact that he had won the competition and was eager to present the proof to his superior at the earliest possible opportunity. When the score sheet failed to arrive, Cetts called up the shooting gallery and was informed that the sheet had already been posted to him some week and a half ago. It had certainly been lost. Another score sheet was sent (this time with a six-schilling stamp of Lindauer Hütte Rätikon, also labelled Republik Österreich), but when that failed to arrive, after another week and a half, Ambras Cetts decided to take matters into his own hands. He marched to the Central Post Office with two of his colleagues, all uniformed in perfectly fitting suits.

  ONLY ONE post office employee was absent from the post office as Ambras Cetts and his colleagues began their investigation, and that was Mother, whose waters had broken early that morning. Soon our faint beats would be joining with all the other hearts’ soft drumming throughout the world, soon the world would be bursting into technicolour.

  Father was seated that morning on his stool by Mother’s empty plastic chair, as tense as an overwound spring. Unable to bear the pain coming out of Mother’s great mouth, he had rushed from the hospital into the comfort of the post office the moment she had started screaming.

  As Mother wailed for God and for Father, and expressed an eagerness for her life to be ended, Ambras Cetts discovered on our postmaster grandfather’s desk a list of letters reported missing, which all happened to have originated from foreign countries. As the list was further examined—as we lessened Mother’s struggles for a kind (and brief) moment—the streets of the complainants were considered, and a map of the city was sought … and found on the wall behind Grandfather’s desk.6

  THIS MAP, a generous size, probably the most comprehensive map of Entralla at that time, was not, however, in the pristine state it had been purchased in. Years of post office dust and labour; years of the exhalations of the post office workers’ nicotine-tainted breaths had bent its corners upwards and made brittle its surface. Generations of employees had been called into the postmaster’s office to offer their many thousands of excuses, both the believable and the fantastic, to list over time all the illnesses that are available to the human body in this part of the world and to elaborate on the processes of these illnesses; or to tell tales of innocent and guilty colleagues; or to express predictable Christmas sentiments; or to be dismissed without a smile; or to shake hands on retirement day and then to look finally at that large map behind Grandfather’s desk for the ultimate time, briefly to view the network of streets, the honeycomb of our lives, before retreating in old age to a life that concerned only a handful of passageways.

  This map had been disfigured by something other than time and the deposits of so many human fingers. It had lines drawn over it in standard black biro, dividing the city into even more sections than already existed. These boundaries were not real walls of bricks, they were not present in our everyday sleeping and waking city; they were the barriers demarcating the streets and districts assigned to the postmen. Each division belonged to one man. And each division had been impaled with a pin on which a piece of fixed paper stuck out at right angles, like a diminutive flag. Each of these toy flags, as if they were to indicate principalities of a country, had a surname written in capitals across it: the name not of the local potentate but of the postman who delivered the letters for that portion of the city. Oh what a useful map this is, thought Ambras Cetts and his colleagues. Three minutes was all it took these achievers to discover the patch on the city’s surface in which all the letters had failed to arrive. A single postman’s division.

  L. Dapps said the flag. Where is this Dapps?, wondered Ambras Cetts and his companions. We’ll speak to this Dapps before the minute is out. To ask him what? To ask him: how is it possible that all these letters should disappear from one district only? One district for which only one postman delivers the letters? One postman who handled not one but all of the absent articles? Is that coincidental or is that criminal? Which one of those, answer us that.

  Now I imagine that I can hear a noise. A sharp noise to provoke ear covering. The sound of the postal horn perhaps? No, no, it is the scream of a woman in labour as she pushes, pants and sweats. This is agony. Mother’s between-the-legs door, our door into the world, is beginning to open, it’s ripping open. But wait a minute—as Mother screams, the door of the postmaster’s office is opened from within. This door should be screaming just like Mother, but, as if mocking my dramatic intentions, it scarcely makes a sound. As Mother continues to scream, something begins to come out of her, something breathing and bloody. At exactly the instant that this life starts to emerge, the door to Grandfather’s office is opened with a barely audible murmur, and three men in suits come out into the post office’s dusty hall.

  ‘Dapps. Which one is Dapps?’ What a question! Surely no one will answer it. But Marta Stroud of counter three unfortunately insists on informing them of her existence by placing her hand up in the air.

  MARTA STROUD’S ugly, hairy arm is in the air, still wobbling from the action that put it there, and shan’t, can’t, won’t be ignored. Marta Stroud who is made more eager by her psoriasis, as if her over-helpfulness might compensate for her unpleasant disfigurement. Marta Stroud with the blotches on her that are islands of mould, as though her disease had stretched a globe across her face—but it is not our globe, it is not the Earth exhibited on her skin; none of the countries are recognisable. Her arm, equally distorted with clumps of islands, bogland most likely, is still spread upwards and her body, the many continents of discoloured itchiness concealed beneath her touch-me-not clothing, joins it now, standing erect on the points of its suffering toes, as if Marta Stroud and her whole map of mould are sure to touch beyond countless universes in their attempt to attract attention. It is this same Marta Stroud who has finally now been noticed, this same Marta Stroud who has formed her body into a pointing device, yes, it is this Mould, this Moist, this
Marta Stroud, who is volunteering, when no volunteers were asked for, the information that Father, our father, visibly frightened now, sitting on his wooden stool by Mother’s plastic seat at the twelfth counter, holding his heart while his mouth urgently searches for air, that Father, our father—I’m nearing the end now, Father’s time is nearly up—that this man is the one they are asking for. He is, in fact, simply, unquestionably, guiltfully … Dapps!

  IN A WARD in the maternity hospital on Saint Mirgarita of Antioch Street (patron saint of pregnant women, who died in the Roman city of Antioch, now the Turkish city of Antakya), Dallia Dapps gave birth to two little girls. She named them Alva and Irva.

  Our birth certificate revealed that Linas Dapps was our father, though it did not reveal that Father was not present at the birth of us, his two daughters, or that when Dallia Lizbet Dapps, née Grett, screamed at the pain of giving birth to her two girls, she should perhaps also have been screaming out for the life of her husband.

  Alva Lina Dapps and Irva Lina Dapps. Identical twins with identical wails. I came first. Irva waited two more hours and then was forced to decide, after some exhausting coercion from Mother, that it was safe to come out. She never really wanted to come out, she’d rather have stayed in there all the while, she never really wanted to come out at all.

  3LOST TREASURES OF ENTRALLA. THE CHAPEL OF SAINT PITER THE MARTYR. There would be no reward for any excursion to this region of the city, either optional or mandatory. It is a small miracle that this church—a superb example of fifteenth-century Christian architecture—stood for so long, being, as it was, predominantly made of wood, wood that had housed within it a population of insects whose numbers could have rivalled any of the great and famous municipalities of the world.

  4SITES OF INTEREST. ENTRALLA CATHEDRAL IN MINIATURE. Postman Girge’s matchstick cathedral is still exhibited within our massive stone cathedral to this day, though it is now in ruins, destroyed by a piece of tumbling masonry the size of a man’s head; the earthquake broke both the cathedral and the cathedral’s model. Today the ruin in matchsticks reminds Entrallans of the ruin in stones, of the broken cathedral before it was fully restored.