Alva and Irva

by Edward Carey

  He told us that there was perhaps another way of knowing when an earthquake was about to occur. This method did not involve expensive scientific machinery, this method in fact required only that a person use his eyes. What must he look for? Creatures behaving strangely, fish leaping out of the water, fowls beginning to roost in trees, horses refusing to enter their stables, cats arching their backs and screaming for no obvious reason, dogs beginning to bark and wail though there is no one at the door. Bats, Mr Irt told us, were the most sensitive of all—they began to panic days before the actual quake. Dogs were perhaps the least sensitive, they didn’t sense the danger until a few hours before. Humans didn’t sense it until it was upon them. He made it clear to our class that the earthquake itself was rarely the direct cause of deaths, but rather it was broken bridges, falling masonry, collapsed buildings, flying glass from broken windows, upturned furniture in houses and offices, fires from broken chimneys or gas leaks, fallen power lines and, most perturbing of all, human panic that did the killing.

  THREE DAYS after the quake Mr Irt took us all on a school outing. Out of Entralla, actually beyond the city, further than we had ever gone before. He didn’t tell us where we were going at first, only that he would show us what damage an earthquake could do. We travelled in the school bus along ever smaller roads, Irva becoming increasingly anxious, feeling homesick, wondering already if we would ever actually see Entralla again. But I felt a joy inside me, as if I could feel myself growing with every moment that we travelled further, I was stretching out over the curved vastness of the globe. ‘So much to see,’ I said to Irva, ‘Open your eyes, look out of the window, look at that! Look at that!’ But Irva kept her eyes tight shut. ‘How far are we going?,’ she kept asking, ‘How far, Alva, how much further?’ And then quieter, ‘I don’t feel safe, I feel like I’m going to fall any moment, I feel sick.’ She was sick when she got off the bus, and I practically had to push her through the door, she didn’t want to get off, as if that bus was the only proof that she would be returning home, as if it were the only proof that the city of Entralla still existed. ‘I want to go home,’ she said, ‘I want to go home.’ ‘Come on, Irva,’ I said, ‘keep up.’ Keep up, I told her, but she couldn’t keep up, she never could. Even in those days when she tried, she was always a little way behind, but not out of sight, not yet. Yes, it was certainly this school trip that started the tearing between Irva and me.

  The class followed Mr Irt into the woods, Irva holding onto the back of my dress, not daring to look up. And then at last we saw it. There was a name for it, it was called, Mr Irt said, Schimakin. In we went, treading carefully, with handkerchiefs held over our faces (but that would not prevent our snot from coming out in shocking black streaks for days afterwards). What a sombre, wordless school group ours was. Forbidden to enter the angled houses lest they collapse with us inside, we looked in through tilted windows to dark rooms where we imagined we saw something move. Schimakin, with its rusting cars and bicycles, even made some of the class cry.

  It was a town without any people in it.

  Irva cheered up a little.

  OPTIONAL EXCURSION 1. A DAY TRIP TO HELL. Many people from our country will say that there is nowhere called Schimakin, or that Schimakin did exist once but has long since vanished and that no one is quite sure where in our country it was ever actually supposed to be. Many people, they will tell you, have spent their lives looking for Schimakin, and many have been killed in that search, disappearing into the night and leaving no message behind to explain where they have gone. Such are the rumours that surround this abandoned town. Schimakin is absent from our maps, our cartographers have agreed that such an unhappy place should never be allowed to exist. But Schimakin, the Pompeii of our country, does exist, directions can even be provided. Take a bus from the principal bus station, opposite Central Train Station on Terminus Road, heading in the direction of the town of Krilna. En route to Krilna the bus will stop at the village of Ugrick, from Ugrick you must walk in a westerly direction across fields, and, after four kilometres, and behind thick woods, the lost town of Schimakin will be found. No roads lead to that place—they have all been removed, ploughed up, scrubbed clean away. In almost every country there are those wondrous and rare spots titled Places of Natural Beauty, places constantly photographed and made into postcards and exhibited on the carousel stands in newsagents’ kiosks nationwide. But there are other, perhaps equally wondrous and hopefully equally rare, spots which exist to compensate, as it were, for those beautiful sites, sites which might be termed, if they were acknowledged (for indeed no newsagent will advertise them), Places of Natural Disaster. Such is Schimakin, an area of high toxicity. One day, deep under Schimakin, the earth became angry, so angry that a vein of coal two hundred metres beneath the surface ignited and is still alight to this day. How long will it burn? For ever, some say. And what happened to Schimakin when this vein ignited? Gross destruction. The town that was Schimakin began to collapse—the homes, the shops, the colliery fell apart as if it were a place of paper and cardboard. Land implosion; great rifts on the skin of our country. Streets disappeared into the depths and houses and cars and people with them, to this day nobody knows the exact number of miners that were lost. With the collapse of the terrain came the vile smoke for the first time. Never-diminishing pillars of sulphurous gas, more durable seemingly than marble, can still be seen spewing in vertical jets here and there, north, south, east and west on the land that was once Schimakin. When the vein caught, people sitting in the privacy of their lavatories felt that yellow smoke rising up their naked legs and the next moment, still seated at their bowls, they journeyed deep down, pulled cruelly, to a place where humans should never go. People in their sitting rooms felt the earth hiss and saw their brick walls collapse around them. One second they were standing in their homes, the next their bodies lay crippled in the outside air. But not all the buildings of Schimakin went when the ground beneath them rebelled. Some are still there now, neglected, dirty and rotten certainly, but still there—and what strange angles they stand at. Looking at this tilted town today you might at first believe it to be the work of a drunken architect. Look how the buildings list—one bending, but never quite falling, towards the twisted high street, another, its neighbour, leaning far the other way, perhaps to keep this disobeying land somehow in balance. It seems all the buildings of Schimakin have their own minds; perhaps the houses have argued, they face away from each other so. This is Schimakin. No one lives here anymore, not even the birds come to visit this stinking place, which smokes and hisses and crackles with its still unspent fury. The sky above it is always darkened. And yet for decades after the disaster some of its people remained, refusing to leave their home; life for them was Schimakin. They huddled together in their lopsided world until the poisonous fumes made them lopsided too. Even then, those toxic people, unable to abandon their dead, would not leave. In the end they too died, some it is rumoured by throwing themselves deep down into the ignited mine shafts.

  THERE WAS A FEELING in Entralla then that life was shortly to end, that so many of us were shortly to stop, to be stopped, for ever. Irva and I would look at the crowds on Napoleon Street or the Paulus Boulevard and try to guess which people had been selected for termination. We wandered the city and chose people, at the traffic lights, standing in queues in the Central Post Office, shuffling beneath the large wooden Jesus in the cathedral. How many people in our imagination we parcelled out deaths to in those strange days. Some were quiet deaths, some were noisy and angry and frightened and painful. Now as we walked the old town together, we whispered to each other, ‘That one, I think,’ or, ‘He’s going to get it, absolutely,’ or, ‘She doesn’t stand a chance, nope.’ We began to clothe the populace of Entralla with an itching mortality that it had perhaps always possessed but which before had been carefully hidden in lonely rooms at three in the morning or behind the windows of hospitals or old people’s homes. But these now widespread morbid preoccupations, which wer
e to some utterly defeating, to others brought new feelings of determination and excitement. Suddenly, with each new morning, with each new minute more precious than ever before, came a strange bravery. The quake had tried to teach us that we had little control over ourselves, that we were insignificant and flimsy; but some Entrallans rebelled from that lesson. In those days it was possible to see people wandering about the city suddenly stop dead with a vast smirk on their face, stick out their tongues or raise their fingers in a salute of derision and yell (either down at the ground or up at the sky, depending on whether they were religious or not), filled with this new boldness: ‘Give that to your hunchback daughter!’8 And afterwards they might run off to murder procrastination. Yes, now timid people, who without the earthquake might ever have remained so, proclaimed love to shocked friends or neighbours or burst into their offices and, filled with a glowing inspiration that sped them onwards, became great achievers—freed from their chains of shyness. There was a great sense of doing in the city then; the prostitutes in the Sex District were exhausted; people rushed about visiting friends and family, ending feuds that would otherwise have been exhausted only by funerals; people ate with a voracity that astonished restaurant owners; people danced with a liberation that their bodies had never known before, and perhaps most astonishing of all, when people passed each other in the streets they would often stop and say, ‘Good morning,’ or, ‘How are you?’ (even though they may never have met the person before) or, ‘What a lovely day’ (even though it might have been raining). I was also caught up in this great tsunami of energetic doing and thinking, this need for communication, and I began to sit upright in class.

  BEFORE WE HAD always had the junior history teacher. Now, for the first time, old and creased Mr Rinas Riddin, a man who seemed to have lived all history, stepped into our class. This is what he said to us that first morning of his tutelage: ‘In order not to slumber in cultural provincialism or spiritual sterility, we are obliged to know everything that happens and everything that has happened in the four corners of the globe.’

  We were to discover the world, Mr Riddin proclaimed, and, tugging the class away from our previous history lessons in which our country held a monopoly, the adventure began. We went to war, armed with sharpened pencils and leaking fountain pens. On wintry afternoons, with classroom strip lighting defying the dark outside, we visited Julius Caesar. And in a lighter classroom, as spring began, we watched the Roman Empire burn. Mr Riddin spun the globe on his desk and we visited those places where his index finger, halting the world’s rotation, commanded our imaginations. We went to China, to Japan, to Turkey, to Russia, to France, to Britain, to America even.

  AFTER MR RIDDIN had begun to introduce us to the world, with my insistence, Irva and I would frequently visit the Central Library on People Street. Irva didn’t like me studying foreign places, she was jealous of them. But, never bearing to leave me alone, she sat beside me, learning everything I learnt, and somehow, because Irva was with me there, those faraway lands began to lose something of their possibilities. It was as if Irva with her sulky concentration was attempting to turn every city in the world into just another Entralla, to make Paris and Marrakesh and Johannesburg yet more Entrallas only with different names.

  We would examine varieties of maps, in the great map room of the library. We’d regard maps of distant cities and I’d wonder to Irva, whispering out those destinations in the hope that saying them would somehow reveal them, ‘What goes on in Franz-Joseph Strasse in München, Deutschland?’ or ‘Who lives in Vytauto Gatve, Vilnius, Lietuva?’ or ‘What’s it like in Via Capo Palimuro in Milano, Italia?’ There were maps of modern cities which gave us only hints of real places, maps of cities in ruins—London after its fire of 1666, San Francisco after its 1906 earthquake, Dresden after the 1945 bombing. There were maps of the world ancient and modern, strange early maps in which the initial cartographers had drawn almost everything the wrong size or the wrong shape and had missed out huge land masses altogether, maps of countries, maps (called charts) of seas, maps of sea battles, maps of land wars, maps of long-forgotten empires, maps of geology, maps (called trees) of genealogy, motorway maps, footpath maps, maps showing the populations of the world, poverty maps, temperance maps, maps showing volcanic activity, maps showing flood plains, maps of the human body. And many of them with a little arrow in the top right corner with the letter ‘N’ above it, for ‘North’.

  I have always found libraries sexual places. I cannot say why exactly. Perhaps it is because there are so many other people sitting around quietly, and it is a good place to people-watch, and because it is often easier to spend time dreaming up imaginary romances with people just a few desks away from you, who seem so reachable, than to return to the second chapter of a five-hundred-page volume. Perhaps it is because all that studying makes me feel hungry, and that hunger turns to another type of hunger. Perhaps it is because all that silence seems so peculiar and suggestive. Or perhaps it’s because of the warmth inside libraries, a warmth which makes so many people fall asleep, sprawled on top of tolerant sentences. Perhaps it’s simply watching those people in the intimacy of sleep, which generally they do under covers, behind closed doors, that now I feel I’ve been given a privileged view of something so private, something that lovers see. In any case, in the library, perhaps simply because of the great exciting mounds of knowledge, I can feel myself warming up. And I enjoyed particularly warm feelings inside the map room, viewing and stroking the colourful surfaces of so many countries, and looking across from our desk to other people, particularly to a certain fair-haired boy, perhaps a year or two younger than Irva and me, who we’d always find somewhere in the library studying maps or guidebooks. But perhaps these sexual feelings of mine had nothing to do with the library at all, perhaps these feelings were just because of the changes that were then going through us, and not only in me but in Irva too, in fact in everyone in our classroom.

  THE FEMALES GREW interested first, the males caught up after a while. And many of the males foolishly chose to fall in love with Kersty Plint (whose breasts were the first to arrive, and what full breasts they were), and how she would make them regret it. And we noticed that her many companions now began, more urgently than before, to ape Kersty (in a similar way, I suppose, to how Irva aped me). These girls began to wear their school uniform in the same slovenly way that she did, to laugh as she laughed. When Kersty wore lipstick, they hurriedly bought lipstick; when Kersty arrived one morning with her ears pierced her companions would rush out that afternoon to perforate theirs as well; when Kersty was seen kissing a boy in the school yard, they would hurriedly find themselves an agreeing male and thrust their lips upon his; when Kersty split up with her boyfriend, their boyfriends were summarily dismissed. But these Kersty duplicates were inexact copies with half identities, blurred reflections.

  Parts of this new experience were perhaps less new to us than to our classmates. We had practised our first kisses on each other so many years ago, we knew each other under the school uniform so perfectly already. Now with what fascination did we watch each other’s bodies changing. We pressed ourselves against each other in scientific comparisons. How extraordinary was this progression of Irva and me. Our nipples decided to enlarge themselves. Beneath them small inexact copies of Prospect Hill began to grow. Our long, thin forms became a fraction more rounded. We began to collect a few hairs between our legs and then more and more, and under our arms as well. Our voices decided they were immature and altered themselves accordingly (but not in the comical way that happened with the males). The upheavals in our bodies made us doubly awkward, long arms and legs always in the way, as if we had too many of each and we were descended not from Dallia and Linas but from a pair of crane flies.

  And then I began to bleed. Mother gave me a cotton bag and a purse (to keep with me throughout the day) in which were kept various feminine items which she instructed me in the use of. Irva was jealous, her whole body stiffened with resentment. She
could barely move she was in such discomfort, terrified of being left behind. But only a few days later, she was also the happy recipient of an identical cotton bag and purse.

  Now, for the first time, I thought it might be good if Irva and I began to spend some moments of each day apart. I began my first attempt to train her away. She could never understand why, she was appalled at this new independence in me, she couldn’t conquer it. To begin with it was only for a few isolated minutes that we were separated, then I demanded quarter hours and even half hours. I’d watch her walk away, turning back every few steps to implore me, but I had to be firm, no matter how much I worried, and I did worry then, for both of us—‘It’s just for half an hour,’ I said, ‘only half an hour.’ How she crumbled in those half hours when we were apart, bits seemed to fall off her; each time we were reunited there seemed less of her than before. And though I cried honest tears when we were together again, I began to somehow enjoy it all. Whole half hours of terrifying and wonderful loneliness! Such Irvaless moments! Such daring!

  THERE WAS a boy in our class called Piter Soffit whose principal characteristic was that he longed to be liked. More than anything he wanted to be liked. The more people liked him the happier he felt. When he felt he was liked he positively jerked with happiness. I began to single him out, with Irva dragging behind me, ‘Hello Piter, hello Piter.’ And he would coyly respond, ‘Hullo, hullo Alva and hullo Irva.’ ‘Would you like to come to our home?,’ I asked him one afternoon. ‘Really?,’ he said, ‘Yes, I would. Really, really?’ Irva didn’t want Piter in our home, she begged me not to let him come, so I invited him the next day. ‘Very well,’ said Irva, ‘let him come, but don’t show him the city, he doesn’t need to see the city, please don’t let him see it.’ We walked him home in between us (with Mother following behind). I asked him as soon as we were home, ‘Would you like to see our city, our own city which we made ourselves?’ ‘Really?,’ said Piter, ‘Would you show me, really?’ I took him up to the attic. I showed him the city, with Irva pushing him back every now and then, stopping him from getting too close. ‘It’s beautiful,’ he said, ‘and to think you made it all yourselves! But where’s it of?’ he asked. ‘It’s our city,’ said Irva, ‘where Alva and I live, we made it just for us.’ ‘Oh, I see,’ said Piter, ‘it’s not a real place, it doesn’t actually exist.’ I stood next to Piter so that we were touching, after a while I began stroking his hair. Piter didn’t say anything. ‘Do you want to touch me?,’ I asked, ‘Or would you rather touch Irva?’ Piter didn’t say anything. ‘Go on, if you want,’ I said, ‘we don’t mind, you can touch us. He can touch us, can’t he Irva?’ Piter stayed quiet and didn’t move. Nor did Irva. ‘Are you shy?,’ I asked, ‘Don’t be shy.’ And then I stroked him a bit more, and I could hear Piter’s faster and faster breathing. And then Piter suddenly started crying. He said through his tears, ‘Leave me alone, please, please leave me alone.’