Alva and Irva

by Edward Carey

  When he still refused to speak to us even after our generous words, we followed him all the way to his home which was on Verres Square (way out of our usual route, and I have to admit that twice we became utterly lost as we retraced our way towards home and when I asked people the way they said that they didn’t know and that they’d never heard of Veber Street or even of Pilias Street, so in the end, and with Irva frightened and in tears, fearing we’d never find home again, we had to walk all the way to Napoleon Street, which was of course a street that people had heard of, and from there we were able to find home, but always, always it was I, and not Irva, who asked the questions). We followed him for about a week. And I’m sure he noticed us following him, because he’d break into a run just as we were reaching Verres Square and when we turned the corner into the square he wasn’t there at all. We knew he lived somewhere on the square but we couldn’t be sure which house, we didn’t know his exact address. Ah, but we knew someone who would. So the next Saturday morning we went on a trip to Napoleon Street to find that extraordinary man who knew where everybody lived, who was known to us simply as Grandfather. We gave Grandfather Girin’s surname and told him that he lived in Verres Square and from that Grandfather was able to work out the precise location of where the elusive fellow was hiding from us: no. 12. And then I said to Grandfather, ‘We wish to send him a present.’ ‘A Valentine?,’ he asked with a smile. ‘No Grandfather,’ Irva said in a panic, ‘It’s April, as you well know.’ We showed Grandfather the present. It was a plasticine model just the same as the one we had, of the Littsen Street school though without any scratches on it. Grandfather looked offended. ‘You’ve been modelling,’ he said, ‘and you didn’t tell me.’ (Grandfather always wanted us to ask his advice, he felt that it was impossible for us to model without it.) ‘I don’t recognise the model,’ he said, ‘What’s it of?’ But we knew he recognised it. Of course he did. I put it in a cardboard box and put scrunched-up newspaper around it for protection. As I was sealing it up Irva taped a needle on the inside of the box’s lid so that that would be the first thing the addressee (a word we learnt from Grandfather) would see and underneath the needle I wrote ‘© ALVA AND IRVA DAPPS’. ‘Why the needle?,’ Grandfather asked us. When I told him it was to make pock marks on the school, he only went, ‘Hem,’ and looked disapproving. And so it was sent. And on Tuesday morning it had arrived, but not in time for school. But on Wednesday morning we were certain he had it because he didn’t even come out into the playground after class. Well, we were offended of course. But we wouldn’t give up, not that easily, though Irva suggested that perhaps we should. And then, mercifully, along came the annual school project to help out.

  MANDATORY EXCURSION. LUBATKIN’S TOWER. The history of our city is considered one of the most important subjects for young pupils. Our most celebrated local figure is of course Grand Duke Lubatkin. Lubatkin, for those ignorant of Entralla’s magnificent past, was the great warrior who expanded the territory of this region of our country, until eventually other countries joined together and laid siege to our city. (The largest piece of civic sculpture in all Entralla is the impressive equestrian statue of Lubatkin at the foot of Prospect Hill.)

  Look about you, turn around until you see … there, at the summit of Prospect Hill, the ruins of the fortress built and protected by Grand Duke Lubatkin. No trolley bus numbers are needed for this excursion—the remaining tower is visible from almost everywhere in the city. Simply use it as your marker and meander through our streets towards it. Climb the two hundred and eighteen steps of Prospect Hill until the tower is reached. Built between 1170 and 1225, it was here that Lubatkin defended the honour of our country, until he too succumbed to death. Not by arrow or by sword but through the horrors of an earthquake. The whole population of our city which was under siege at that time is reported to have died in the quake. It was said afterwards, in the closing section of our oral epic, ‘The Entralliad’, which every Entrallan knows by heart, that once the earth was still again, ‘Neither scream of child, nor wail of woman, neither bark of dog, nor crow of cock, nor any sound but only quiet, eternal quiet, deathly quiet was left within the broken walls of Lubatkin city on Lubatkin hill in Lubatkin land.’

  Do take the time to admire the breathtaking view of the city this position offers where all our buildings from the Gothic to the Renaissance to the Baroque, even until the blocks of flats, dreary estates, speak so eloquently of all of the city’s days, recent and long since past; these buildings are the cast of characters in the great drama of Entralla. It is even possible to see from this observation post some of the gross damage sustained during the most recent earthquake. Walking down almost any street in the centre of our city it is possible to travel forwards and backwards through so many centuries of architectural taste, but here, on Prospect Hill, all secrets are spilled at once. Here, in this view, the entire history of Entralla is indelibly etched on its wondrous skyline. Has ever a city been so legible? There, look at it, there is the past told in our ancient structures, the present in our modern ones and the future under the shadows of the builders’ cranes. Look: history! There is history. As you return to the city, as you are descending the two hundred and eighteen steps of Prospect Hill, imagine that you are accompanied by the shouts and screams of schoolchildren, imagine among those schoolchildren a pair of female twins who seem to be pursuing a bespectacled boy, slightly behind the main group.

  AFTER A COMPULSORY school trip up Prospect Hill, we were set the task of making something or writing something relating to Grand Duke Lubatkin. This was to take the place of any homework that we might otherwise have been given for three whole weeks. When the weeks were up we were all required, one by one, to ascend the podium in the assembly room and give a brief speech.

  Irva and I were absent from the knowledge quest that was ostentatiously exhibiting itself on the large tables of the Central Library on People Street, where boys and girls each attempted to look more studious than the other. What a historic stroking of chins took place in those days as they searched through heavy leather-bound tomes that smelt so sour, and fingered delicate, ancient and misspelt maps of local towns and cities that looked like the efforts of confused men from the mad houses, so little did their work resemble our country’s modern settlements. But why were Irva and I not in the library? Where were we acquiring our information? What was our project to be? In the years before, our contribution to the school project had been a miserable inconspicuous thing, timorous and unexceptional, but this year there was something to prove, this year I aimed for us to gain the attention and respect of the Quiet Boy. And so it was that our first victory with plasticine occurred and we came first in school.

  ON THE USEFULNESS OF PLASTICINE BUILDINGS 2: HOW TO COME FIRST IN SCHOOL. The second exhibit to be found in Gallery 24 of the Entralla Art Museum is a large model constructed of red plasticine of a historic walled city, within which, on the summit of a hill, are the remains of a fortress. For their entry the twins had created a plasticine model of the architecture of our city built in the time of Grand Duke Lubatkin. But they had not depicted the city as it would have looked through Lubatkin’s eyes, rather they had built it as it would be seen in the present were all the buildings erected since Lubatkin’s time removed. The fortress in their model, for example, is exactly how the fortress appears today. But the old wall which used to surround the fortress was no longer clearly visible and only traces of it remain. Occasionally a clump of ancient bricks is seen connected to a more modern building, or more rarely a trench where a part of the wall had been removed. The twins revealed where in the city pieces of the wall are still present and from that were able to show how our city had grown in size since the time of Lubatkin’s parental care. During all the research for this model not a single book had been consulted. The twins achieved their knowledge by walking around the old town, carefully observing. All the evidence was there to be found, they simply spent the time to discover it.

  This model is certainly i
n the poorest condition of all the exhibits in Gallery 24. Dust so thick it resembles mould particularly distorts the sad fortress. But worst of all is the length of wall at the southern end of this predominantly empty city. This approximately fifty-centimetre-long imitation of ancient masonry has been flattened out of all shape. If it were possible with minuscule tweezers to remove all hairs and skins of dust, an identifiable print of a child’s rather podgy elbow would be found. But the owner of the elbow, a boy called Piter Soffit, was not to blame. He was pushed as the children crowded around the plasticine skeleton of this ancient city. The appearance of Piter Soffit’s elbow robbed the city of its beauty and proved in a swift and clumsy moment its heartbreaking fragility. And how cruel it was that its destruction did not make that shattering sound which so alarmingly and worthily brings us to the attention of broken china or glass, how cruel it was that it could be demolished into an illegible lump without so much as a sigh. The teachers were unable to see amongst that scrum of young students who had pushed the boy, though they suspected that it might have been someone called Kersty Plint. Several pupils insisted that in fact it was not Kersty Plint but a boy called Girin Lang, a rumour which the twins never believed.

  AFTER THE SCHOOL project a photograph was taken of us standing before our successful model and later that photograph together with one of the whole school and various essays and drawings by other of our fellow schoolmates were put into a metal tube which was sealed at both ends and buried deep in the school grounds. A time capsule. So that other generations of Entrallans, long after our deaths may learn what it was like to be us. Our plasticine victory was safe for centuries to come.

  7INCIDENTALLY—for the sake of our visitors not familiar with the metric system of measurement, the twins Alva and Irva Dapps grew to a height of six foot, two inches.

  A LOVE STORY

  WRITTEN ON THE CEILING OF

  THE CENTRAL TRAIN STATION

  Station Hall

  The hall of our Central Train Station (trolley bus 8 from either Market or Cathedral Squares, trolley bus 11 from Entralla University), like many another station hall, is far larger than it need be; even at peak times its immensity is never filled. In the long afternoons, before a brief fit of activity at five o’clock, the railway customers walk cautiously around the edges, relying heavily on the emotional support granted by the various periphery establishments of the ticket office, the waiting room, the lavatories, the two restaurants (one with waiter service, the other with counter service selling principally American-style cuisine), before finally building up the courage to make the distressing dash to their platform. And yet, one night two school children far from being frightened by the vastness of this place have felt a freedom here that they would experience nowhere else in this city.

  THE QUIET BOY, Girin Lang, who we knew secretly wanted to be with us, continued to avoid us all the time, despite our winning the first place in school. He very rarely came out into the playground any more and if he did he would always go up to some other children and speak to them, forcing himself upon their company. I didn’t mind, I could wait. The city of Alvairvalla is a city of plasticine and of patience.

  We continued to follow him to Verres Square. Mother would inevitably be waiting for us at the school gates but we’d walk past her: ‘We’re not coming home, mother, not yet.’ We’d follow the Quiet Boy all the way to his house on Verres Square, and once we reached Verres Square, and he’d darted inside his house again, we’d often sit on benches in the square just looking at his house, for hours sometimes, just looking. Occasionally we’d see his little white face peeking through the net curtains on the ground floor, checking to see if we, his friends, were still there. When we saw his little face staring at us, we’d stare back at him, our hearts beating faster and faster, and we’d keep staring at him until his face disappeared behind the curtains again. He was always the first one to stop staring. But after a month or so of this following, while we were sitting in Verres Square, the door of no. 12 opened and there stood a thin woman with a cigarette, who was the Quiet Boy’s mother, Mrs Lang, looking directly at us and at no one else. She even walked up to us, she told us to clear off, to leave her son, our friend, alone, to stop terrorising him. Obviously, we said to each other, shaking with nerves, as we returned home, obviously she hadn’t understood. We weren’t terrorising the Quiet Boy. Hardly that.

  The day after we were ushered into the headmaster’s office. Grandfather was in the office and so was Mother and so was Mrs Lang, but not the Quiet Boy himself, who she referred to throughout the meeting as ‘My Girin’ or ‘My Little Girin’ or ‘My Darling Little Girin’. We were told that we were forbidden to follow the Quiet Boy any more, that we had upset him, that we were giving him nightmares, that he would wake up in the night screaming, all because of us. We terrified him, his mother said, we had seen that he was shy and timid and because of this we had gone after him and would never leave him alone. Something had to be done about it.

  Mrs Lang said to Mother: ‘Your daughters walked straight out of a picture book that frightens children. They should’ve stayed in that picture book, you should have left them there.’ The headmaster told Mrs Lang to calm down, and then with utter strictness he said to us: ‘This following/bullying can not continue.’

  We were forbidden to go near him ever again; if we were caught following him there’d be great trouble. Verres Square and the Quiet Boy: out of bounds. We must keep our distance at all times. After we left the headmaster’s office we had identically red and throbbing right hands from ten strikes each by the headmaster’s ruler, which stopped us, for a day, from working with plasticine.

  Irva insisted that Alvairvalla didn’t need company after all and for a while I agreed with her. We returned to our city and allowed it to grow a little more, adding extra streets for ourselves alone. And it was at this time, as we progressed with our labours, that we discovered it was best, after we had roughly moulded the plasticine into its required proportions, never to touch it with fingers again because fingers always left a mark. And so our plasticine models began to improve as we moved them and shaped them with special plastic and wooden knives which Mr Misons sold in his shop—though these plastic and wooden tools were supposed to be used with clay and not with plasticine.

  In any case, very soon people would have more pressing things than us to worry over, very soon our pursuing the Quiet Boy would be forgotten. People’s thoughts everywhere would stretch and expand until they were concerned more with planets than with people.

  THERE ARE MANY people on this earth who believe the earth to be solid, who trust the surface that they step upon every day and trust it so implicitly that they scarcely even think of it. Terra firma they call it. But the earth is not to be trusted. There is a mighty subterranean engine beneath us and sometimes that engine vibrates and in those vibrations can be heard a roar, a roar of something that will dismiss any faith in that ground beneath our feet. Cracks open and from somewhere down below terror pours out.

  In 1742 in Lisbon, the capital of Portugal, an earthquake demolished so much of the beautiful city that town planners considered moving the capital’s site completely. In 1976 in Tangshan, People’s Republic of China, it is estimated that 350,000 people were killed by an earthquake. On 7 December 1988, 25,000 people were crushed to death in an earthquake in Spitak, Armenia, most of them trapped in public buildings, apartment blocks and schools. Schools.

  How we pitied the poor schoolchildren of Spitak, as we sat in our own classroom, together at our shared desk, earnestly regarding the walls and ceiling, trying to seek out cracks. The science master, Mr Irt, the whole of the class, the whole of the city even, were speaking of earthquakes again. There had been a tremor on the earth’s surface. Buildings had shaken, a few brick chimneys had collapsed, a few ornaments had jumped down from their shelves to their deaths, but that was all. No serious damage had been caused, and mercifully no one had died. But the aftershocks inside the minds of the people of our ci
ty would far outlast the gentle rumbling of that innocent tremor. The younger schoolchildren on Littsen Street, too young perhaps to realise the seriousness of this event, began to scream in the playground, ‘An earthquake! An earthquake!,’ and even, ‘Let’s have another,’ and then, jumping up and down on the tarmac, they yelled out, ‘Come on earth, quake!’

  Mr Irt informed our class that seismologists from America had measured the earth tremor. They reported that it was only a minor tremor, that there was still a good deal of stored energy along the fault line on which our city was built. This meant that further earthquakes of a much more serious nature should be expected. When? They could not say. They could guess where and even how violently but not (such is the current failure of the science of seismology) when.