Alva and Irva

by Edward Carey

  5ENTRALLANS OF NOTE. AMBRAS JONAS CETTS. Former Mayor. Perhaps some people may feel, considering this man with his dazzling future, perfect features and healthy body, that he is the hero this history has so far failed to produce. And in a way, a kind of way, he is.

  6INCIDENTALLY—for the following paragraphs it may be useful to view the map at the front of this book.

  INTERLUDE 1

  Coffee

  Market Square

  Café Louis, Market Square 14. Open 10:00-23:30 tel. 316 80 24.

  Market Square is found easily enough on Arsenal Street in easy walking distance from Cathedral Square, and is always a worthwhile place to visit. The square abounds in cafés: there are no less than twelve open every weekday; on weekends five are available to accommodate the Saturday evening adolescents in search of noise and love and beer; or three are open for the benefit of the Sunday morning stroller in search of coffee and peace, but who may become irritated by the sudden arrival of the after-church family crowd. On Wednesdays, market day, the square is of course particularly busy and populated by many stalls selling fresh produce, electronic equipment, a wide variety of second-hand clothes, religious amulets, antiques, plastic objets d’art. The buildings that surround the square are all fifteenth century with terracotta tiles and wooden beams. But sadly, due to our earthquake, many are replicas.

  CAFÉ LOUIS, a red building with ‘LOUIS’ clearly marked on its front (in any case the café with the wonky awning), is where I would recommend our distinguished foreign visitors take their morning coffee break. If on entering you are initially disgusted by the smell of tobacco smoke, do not immediately rush out in search of another café—all cafés have this smell: we are a nation of smokers. Instead, allow the smell to remind you of Linas; it is good that you should consider Linas now.

  I have suggested this café not solely because it is one of those places which offers a 10 per cent reduction to all readers of this book. (Though this should of course be taken advantage of—and be sure to exhibit the book each time the waitress comes forward, and perhaps even to point at it indiscreetly.) But I recommend the café also for its excellent thick, bowel-moving coffee. In fact not even purely for the coffee, or the 10 per cent reduction, has this place been selected above all others; nor is it even for the scores of beautiful late-teenage waitresses that Louis has employed over the decades of his café’s existence to soften the hearts of hard old men and make them linger and care less for the thickness of their wallets. No, the principal reason for my recommendation is that sitting amongst you now as you drink the faultless coffee are various men and women from our city, regulars at Café Louis, who happen also to be characters (or the children of characters) from this book.

  Let us start with the couple in the darkest corner of the bar, two men, both sitting with coffee or beer in front of them, not talking but with anxious expressions on their faces, as if they dare not talk, as if they are waiting for something or someone. One is older, he is tall and podgy and nervous, he drums his fingers on the table’s surface; the other, shorter with greying hair, sighs noisily every now and then. But these two characters have yet to be introduced in this history (perhaps that is why they are so impatient), so let us leave them alone for the time being with their secret anticipation. Let us turn instead to Louis himself, for he is invariably there, or at least his body is—his mind travels increasingly longer distances until one day, surely not far from now, it will never come back. Look at stationary Louis: what a wonderful wrinkled old fellow he is. Look how white his hair is, see how mildly he looks ahead—he had such a temper once that he smashed all the dozens of coffee cups and all the lines of beer glasses one evening, two decades back (out of love), as if all those glasses and cups were the containers of his happiness, and so had to be broken because he was miserable. Louis, even in his more active days, will never perform a major role in this history, though when his hair was black, his café was frequently visited by Alva Dapps, who liked to rest here from her walks around Entralla.

  Please note the wooden seat next to Louis. It is empty. It is always empty now. It was once filled with the ample behind of a man named Kurt Laudus. Here rests, if not a character from this book, then a ghost of a character from this book. The Kurt who once sat on this stool was the same Kurt who once worked in our Central Post Office, but who was never, despite a postmaster’s hopes, to fall in love with one Dallia Dapps, née Grett. Kurt loved only men, and his greatest love was Louis, a love which Louis’s customers never spoke openly about, for such a love was officially prohibited then. Kurt once squandered Louis’s ever-constant attentions on a student of archaeology from Entralla University, and it was because of this that Louis smashed all his cups and glasses and also, a short while later, Kurt’s face.

  But Kurt Laudus has left us now, embraced by a collapsing building one July 16th, during our earthquake adventure. The chair is occupied only by memory: histories from the brain of a vague and snow-white, gently dying, mourning lover.

  Here also should be, slouched over the bar, nonchalantly working through one of the day’s many tall, half-pint glasses of local blonde beer (highly recommended, incidentally), Lavinja Cetts, Ambras Cetts’s daughter. You will remember at what promise-filled moment we left Ambras’s career (and what results his over-eagerness had on the progression of the twins’ history). Well, here now is his forty-year-old daughter, shaking slightly, aggressive with loneliness and stooped over by it also, who is paying the price for the phenomenally successful life of her impeccable father

  Enjoy your coffee.

  PART TWO

  Alva & Irva

  AN OVER-PROTECTIVE

  MOTHER ONCE LIVED ON

  VEBER STREET

  Residential Streets

  Taking trolley bus 5-heading out of the city, away from Cathedral and Market Squares-you will quickly find yourself entering a residential area of the city Do not be frightened. Here is where the real stories are kept, not in the larger, more imposing structures of Entralla’s centre, but rather inside its ordinary domestic dwellings. Certainly the guidebook to our city will not advise you to take trolley bus route 5, unless it is heading in the opposite direction, but that is one of many failings of that book. Take the stop at Pilias Street in sector eight of our city, from there it is a short stroll to Veber Street, where this chapter shall be focused.

  MOTHER HELD AT each breast an Alva or an Irva. While I struggled and wriggled with life, unable to lose the feeling of delight for movement, Irva kept very still. Only her eyes seemed to move, following Mother’s actions with the disapproving look of an ancient. I was easy to feed, clamping my mouth to Mother’s nipples and sucking with so ferocious an energy that Mother believed she could feel herself emptying out. But Irva had to be carefully encouraged; she kept turning her heavy head away from the nipples as if away from life, and often Mother had to feed her with a bottle, and often she was sick.

  THIS IS HOW we looked, these were the gifts we were given: from Mother pale skin and dark hair; from Father big heads and weak hearts. Not much of an inheritance.

  Mother returned to her flat on Napoleon Street with two more little lives than she had left it and with one less big one. How the flat smelt of Father. From one window she could look out and see Napoleon Street down which Father had been escorted away from the post office towards the police buildings, already so pale, already with strange shooting pains in his arm. Whenever she looked out of the window, Mother saw Father being taken away again and again. In her mind she saw him, night and day, being escorted down the street, and, once out of sight, quickly reappearing again, still under escort, still crying the same tears. And no one ever came running to help him. Weak and dreamy Orphan Linas, Linas the Potent, our tall father, had miserably confessed to Ambras Cetts and his companions everything about letters from foreign countries and everything about an abandoned house on Foundry Lane with dangerous floorboards. What he had done was criminal, they told him. What he had done would not go unpunish
ed. What he had done meant that he would have to accompany them immediately on an excursion to the police station. And suddenly Father knew that he would never see Mother again, because here he was, flanked by men on either side, being walked out of the post office and up Napoleon Street, surely (of this he felt certain) on the way to his execution. He stood swaying in the police station, even though there was no breeze. The floor started rushing towards him. And everything went dark.

  ‘Linas Dapps: extinct of a weak heart’, the report states. He simply slumped forwards. A doctor’s note stapled to the report mentioned the words ‘Systole’, ‘Ventricle’ and ‘Atrium’ and concluded with the words ‘Mitral Insufficiency’.

  Mother realised that if she were to care properly for us, if she were to keep our baby hearts twitching, then she must find some place where the window offered a different view. So Mother left her home, where she had played briefly the role of wife, and entered a new one where she would perform as Mother. And for that she permitted Grandfather to help. Grandfather rented a house on Veber Street, in sector eight of Entralla, far away from post offices, opera houses, theatres and police rooms.

  THERE WAS a time when we knew everyone in Veber Street. There were the Misons, mother, father, son, daughter, who had their toy shop on Pilias Street, who all had red hair, except for the daughter who was blonde. There was Plint the butcher, his meagre wife and their aggressive daughter. There was Miss Stott the tailor who seemed ancient when I first remember her but who continued to be ancient, her ancientness becoming ever more convincing over the following years. There was Fiff the baker who lived with his red-faced wife, whom he was rumoured to have beaten frequently, and their three sons over at number twenty three. And there was Jonas Lutt who lived on his own, but who was very rarely at home, and who had just become a long-distance lorry driver.

  For a while Veber Street and those streets that connected to it were all that we needed to know of the world, it was our corner of existence, our village in a city, Entralla in microcosm. Everything that we learnt and saw could be contained within it: Veber Street, Pilias Street, Umper Street, Hill Street, W. Glinksy Street and Eemar Walk. Pilias Street was our Mecca, since it contained the most shops (we supposed then that there was nowhere else so colourful, nowhere so populated), and beyond it lay places and people we scarcely even thought of. But mainly, and certainly to begin with, it was just Veber Street for us.

  WE DO NOT recall our arrival on Veber Street, we were too young. But surely one day we did arrive and once inside our new home Mother shut the door behind her and closed all the shutters on the ground floor. When the people of the street came knocking in the hope of introducing themselves, Mother would not answer. When Mother shopped for her provisions she left us at home, safe, she presumed, huddled up together, surrounded by the bars of our shared cot. And as she shopped she would not allow herself to be drawn into conversation.

  Our poor mother had become a mother and a widow on the same day at the age of seventeen. Mother’s brain had formed the words ‘recluse’, ‘hermit’, ‘anchorite’ and ‘misanthrope’, and found it liked them very much. Mother had decided never to let anyone come into her home, no. 27 Veber Street, except for the inevitable prying glare from her visiting father. There would be no such thing even as Veber Street for us baby girls, the world would be reduced to no. 27. But ‘27’ was what was written on the outside of the house, and so that too must be lost. All that was important were the rooms and levels of this new home. In this new world the continents of Africa and America and Asia would not be permitted to exist, nor would the great blueness of the Pacific and Indian and Atlantic oceans. The world had become dehydrated, it had withered and shrunk and breathed in until it had taken on the exact dimensions of a house in our city.

  THE FIRST THING, Irva used to tell me, that she could ever remember was waking up alone. She sensed that she was about to die. She screamed and screamed. Mother came in and put on the lights, and there was I on the floor. Limp Alva. I’d banged my head. I’d managed to climb over the bars of the cot and got out. Mother fixed the bars higher.

  THESE WERE our first words.

  Irva: ‘Alva’.

  Alva: ‘Alva’.

  SOMETIMES WE would play under the kitchen table with wooden building blocks and also with Lego from the country of Denmark. I did the building, Irva passed the bricks to me. And sometimes Mother would read to us.

  Mother had one book with her for company, a manual on baby care (translated from the English), which she read and reread as if its ordered chapters and recommendations were some profound treatise or the collected works of a master poet. In much the same way as people recite great memorised chunks of the Bible in moments of distress, in later life Mother would incongruously quote from her book on babies. I remember her, years after Irva and I had grown up, whispering this one day in the kitchen as she was waiting for the kettle to boil: ‘To burp the child place him in an upright position against your shoulder and gently pat his back or behind to help him bring up his wind. Do not be frustrated when baby refuses to burp, it does not mean that he is ill or abnormal; sometimes this process takes time. When he burps, consider that a victory. And congratulate yourself.’

  Over the years Mother’s freckles, the one remnant of her childhood, faded. Her stomach grew to keep her depression company. Her depression was there to keep alive the memory of Father. She fed it well, she stroked it, she looked after it. It was her miserable, heavy friend. The memory of Father was evident to us throughout our childhood in the form of a wooden, three-legged stool. Mother had Grandfather bring Father’s stool from the post office to our home in Veber Street. The stool always stood on a side table in the kitchen, where we were frequently encouraged to consider it, to touch it even; to begin with Irva and I believed our mysterious father was a stool and not a person at all. On special occasions Mother would take the stool down from its table and allow us to sit on it. We’d take it in turns to sit on the stool. When I was sitting on the stool, Irva would sit on my lap and vice versa. And, a little later, but I’ll mention it now since we’re considering Father and his stool, Grandfather said, looking at the stool, ‘Some people, like some buildings, are built well and last long; others, poorly constructed, soon collapse. It’s how it is. Rootless. No foundations. What did you expect?’

  The early death of Father had made Mother morbid. She was horrified at how complicated human beings are; she didn’t understand all those components and wires within every one of us; she feared that once something had gone wrong inside, no matter how slight, death must inevitably follow. She was terrified of illnesses, at how many there were out there in the world, beyond our home, at how they waited for their moment in and around other humans. She saw death all over the city, all over the streets. Every sneezing passer-by meant to pass chronic pneumonia onto us; every shop owner sprinkled arsenic on his products; every car and every trolley bus harboured desires to swerve up onto the pavement. Whenever she looked at us she could see us dead. She saw our slumped forms in horrible poses, after a multitude of expirations. Asphyxiated by leaking gas. Drowned in the bath. With our skulls shattered after we had fallen from a window. She could never relax her protection, never once; the moment she did, Irva or I, or perhaps both of us, would cease to be. Of this she was certain. Each morning when she found us alive, she took hold of her book on baby care, kissed its cover and blessed it.

  THERE WAS little then to differentiate us from each other. Our eyes were the same shade of blue, our hair the same length and colour, our skin was identically pale and thin and revealed the same streams of blue-green veins on our big foreheads and on our arms and legs. But sometimes Mother would see me pressing myself against the front door, peering cautiously through the keyhole. And at other times she might open the large cupboard in the kitchen where the saucepans were kept to find Irva inside, huddled up in the darkness.

  IT WAS OF course Grandfather and not Mother who took us on our first remembered excursions out into the
world. First in a pushchair, a double pushchair with twin seats, and later, taking each of us by a hand, he would take us out to see Veber Street and sometimes even some of what existed beyond (but never past Pilias Street). And people, women mostly, would often stop Grandfather, and together they would talk about us, and sometimes our heads would be patted (which we never liked), and often, from our pushchair or later standing either side of, and probably even clinging to, Grandfather’s legs, we would hear the word, ‘Lovely’, or the sentence ‘Aren’t they gorgeous?’ But always, always, ‘How can you tell them one from the other, postmaster?’ And of course he would have to reply, ‘Well, actually I can’t, but their mother can.’ And the other person would respond with the air of an expert, ‘Well, yes, you’d expect that, wouldn’t you, that’s the maternal bond, isn’t it?’

  AMONG THE many gifts Grandfather bought us was a stamp album. How overjoyed he was while watching us peer through our (identical) magnifying glasses, examining so studiously all the little colourful squares of paper. But Grandfather was never once permitted to bring us foreign stamps. Mother was quite clear about that. And just to make sure, all the stamps were examined by her before being passed on (with what nostalgia did she one day inspect a set of stamps depicting beetles), for death was lurking in those foreign stamps. Our weak and dreamy father had been taken in by their bright and beautiful colours; it wouldn’t happen to us.

  AND SO CAME the time of our first adventures in plasticine. Grandfather was the one who supplied us with our first packet of plasticine: multicoloured strips, clean and corrugated, neatly covered in transparent sheets of plastic to prevent them from becoming dirty and sheathed in a bright red cardboard box. The front of the box bore the legend ‘HERKIN’S PLASTICINE’, the reverse ‘HERKIN’S TOYS, 12-23 MIRCAN STREET, SECTOR 2, ENTRALLA 2006’. Grandfather had shown us some of his matchstick children, but had urged us not to come too close, never to touch. We had sat watching him, sitting holding hands on the sofa, rigid with attention, such informative hours contemplating Grandfather carefully building away. But when it had come to our turn to build with matchsticks, when grandfather had reluctantly sacrificed a few matchsticks and a blob of glue, our creations had been a great disappointment. We were unable to make matchsticks resemble anything other than … matchsticks. So Grandfather bought us plasticine, an easier building material. Suitable for novices; ages four and up.