by Edward Carey
The man wanted to ask permission to have the city moved again. To a lighter place where it could be more easily viewed. It had all been thought through, he said, we had only to agree. It would be taken to one of the conference rooms in the City Hall, the public would no longer be allowed to visit it. It was called to higher things, reconstruction architects and politicians wanted it now. Besides, it would be better looked after, the man whispered, in the City Hall. ‘But,’ Irva said, ‘Do you want all of the city or only the central part?’ He didn’t understand. She showed him the other boxes. ‘What’s in those boxes?,’ he asked. ‘Entralla,’ she said, and opened a box so he could see. The man looked shocked, no longer in whispers he said, ‘But all the boxes … It’s enormous … All Entralla?’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘We didn’t finish, we were unable to finish because of the earthquake.’ The man scratched his head. He said, ‘It won’t fit in any of the conference rooms.’ Irva said, ‘No, most probably it won’t, it’s very big, you see, very big.’
OVER THE NEXT few days different men in suits came to visit Saint Onne’s and to measure the boxes and to do sums and finally they said that they had found a place in which the whole city could be fitted. A warehouse, in Outer Entralla. And so the city was moved once more. This time in army trucks. And we were moved with it.
SO THE DUST sheets of my days were pulled away, Irva wound me up with encouragement and her new-found confidence, she shuffled me unsteadily back to plasticine construction. We slotted the city together. No one else was permitted to help. It took us nearly two weeks. Their calculations had been faulty, they had to keep extending the large table (which was really several large tables bolted together) they had built entirely for our city—that table which we slept under in army sleeping bags at night. ‘More?’ they kept asking us. ‘Yes, more,’ we’d say, ‘More. More.’
To see it in its entirety! Laid out in its completeness! All plasticine Entralla! Each chipboard square by chipboard square, slowly expanding. Only then did we truly understood the enormity of our work, only then could we understand the size of Entralla, the weight of it. And when the official people came to see it they gasped. Had we really done all this by ourselves, we had of course, no one else, don’t you believe us? ‘But why?’ they asked, ‘Why had we?’ I told them, with shrugs, ‘Maybe because we were lonely.’ And we had to admit that it was incomplete. And that it was impossible to finish now of course.
Then we met Ambras Cetts, who was the man, unintentionally perhaps, who had killed our father. I was going to tell him, but instead we both just sat, smiling, nervous. This was our mayor, our mayor was talking to us, to Irva and to me! ‘Excellent work,’ he told us. ‘Very useful,’ he said. ‘True patriots,’ he said. ‘Goodbye,’ he said.
We never once replied to any of his comments.
WE WERE TO become a story for the digestion of the Entrallan populace. We were, with our plasticine city, to be pushed forward as an example of the Entrallan spirit. We were to be made a fuss of. They took photographs of us standing near the city, and on one occasion Ambras Cetts came to stand in between us and smiled his smile which made us forgive him almost instantly, even for Father’s death. (We’re taller than Ambras Cetts, we measured him, one hundred and seventy-two centimetres, how small he looked in those photographs with Irva and me either side of him.) They published articles about us. ‘ALVA AND IRVA, TRUE CITIZENS OF ENTRALLA’. One said, ‘PLASTICINE TWINS SAVE CITY’. ‘How ridiculous!’ we cackled, ‘Some people will probably think we’re made of plasticine!’ They wrote how useful our work was in recovering Entralla. They made up strange stories about how each and every building was accurately measured, about how Grandfather and Mother had helped us, about how Father had died trying to save people in an old earthquake years back. One article even said: ‘Michelangelo with his marble, Rembrandt with his oils, Alva and Irva with their plasticine.’ They made huge posters which they stuck on giant billboards. Between a man on his horse in a cowboy hat advertising cigarettes and a nearly naked woman with a great waterfall of blonde hair standing in a sunflower field advertising shampoo, could be found Alva and Irva advertising hope. With the caption: ‘IF THEY CAN BUILD THE CITY, SO CAN WE’. The North scars on our foreheads, we noticed, had been airbrushed out.
THERE WAS much talk in those days, and many arguments, about whether the actual city should be carefully reconstructed as it once was or whether the past should be forgotten and a new fresher city be made in its place. Mostly, people wanted the old Entralla back, and the designs put forward which gave the damaged parts of the city exact gridded streets with exact squares were quietly put aside. Many new buildings were to be built of course but mostly in the outer circles of Entralla and certainly never in the old town, which was to be carefully rebuilt in its former beauty (except for the Paulus Boulevard; Paulus suffered most of all, ancient, sophisticated buildings would in the future look onto duplicate blocks). Enlarged photographs of the plasticine old town were placed on stands throughout the actual old town. One article said that we, the Dapps twins, had inspired it to be rebuilt, because from our model it was easy to see just how wonderful the old town used to be. And everyone, or so it seemed to us, was talking about the glorious architecture of the old town, when before, when they had seen it every day, they had barely thought of it at all. Ambras Cetts presented us with two plaques on which were keys. We were given the keys of the city of Entralla, and with them came something called the ‘freedom of Entralla’, which we had thought all along was already ours.
THEY LET THE people of Entralla come and see the plasticine city. There were large queues around the warehouse, but they weren’t allowed to come too close, they weren’t allowed to touch. They put ropes around the city, and only we were allowed to go under those ropes. They fixed red velvet curtains all around the edge of the model. Often when all the people came to see the city we would be underneath the massive tables, hidden from sight by the velvet curtains, listening to all those many people talking about plasticine Entralla (talking about themselves, the geography of their lives). We whispered to each other, trying not to cackle too loudly, occasionally peeping out through the curtain to see all the different types of the shoes of the people of Entralla. We remember once someone from a place called Wibb Street complained because Wibb Street hadn’t been built with plasticine; it was as if his home didn’t exist. But it did exist, we hadn’t reached it, it was too far out, that was all. On that day there was also an art critic from one of the newspapers, and he said: ‘Such is the way with all art. All art, my dear fellow from Wibb Street, can never be totally completed, only, in the end, abandoned unfinished.’
And that was how we passed our days mostly, under the table of our city. And when the people had gone we’d creep out of our hiding place and look all over the city and see where we thought the plasticine needed repairing. And sometimes Jonas would come and stay with us. But the truth could not be hidden from us. Slowly the city was drying out, losing the sharpness of its colours, we kept putting fresh plasticine over the cracks but the cracks kept coming back, whole squares would have to be replaced, and we couldn’t get to the centre of Entralla without dismantling the table which the entire city was standing on, and they wouldn’t let us do that, and we saw how grey with dust Lubatkin’s Fortress had become. And as the city declined, as it shrivelled and creased, so, it seemed to me, Irva declined, she shrivelled and creased too. The worse the city’s state became the less Irva was interested in repairing it, she was content to watch me looking after it but unwilling to help. She looked at the cracks, at the gathering dust, at the faded colours, at the dehydrated suburbs, with increasingly detached looks, and she preferred to sleep now when people came to visit the warehouse. She no longer cared about their footwear.
And as the city’s illness increased, as it wrinkled in its old age, it seemed to me from under our table that there were fewer and fewer shoes to watch. Slowly the number of people visiting the city was declining, until in the end there were only
ten or so people a day. And the other people who worked in the warehouse said it didn’t seem worth opening it to the public anymore, because the public in those days had lost their passion for plasticine.
Our brief and local fame was over.
AFTERWARDS, WHEN the warehouse was closed to visitors, I would leave Irva sleeping under the table, and walk about the city and see that the large advertising posters of us were hardly anywhere anymore and when I did see them often they would have been graffitied over. Our teeth had been blackened out or naked breasts had been drawn over us and once I even saw drawings of men’s penises right next to our faces. I defaced one poster myself, I tiptoed up in the train station, I added two arrows, pointing upwards, and two ‘Ns’.
And then all the posters were covered up. And if there were any articles about us now they were mostly unkind articles that said we were backward, that Irva was practically feral, that we had deliberately cut ourselves off from people even as we were amongst them. One article stated, ‘It is a true sign of the insignificance of our city that whilst other cities have artists like Michelangelo who work with marble, or Rembrandt who paints in oils, we must have two introverted women who play with a substance designed for infant usage: plasticine.’
I knew why all this was. It was because it was taking so long to reconstruct Entralla, a year already and still so much of it was rubble. People wanted to forget about the earthquake, they wanted to cheat themselves with lies about it never having happened. They never looked up at the cranes and they cursed the plasticine city. They wanted to get on with their lives, they wanted to forget us.
And they were probably right. It was probably time for the city to die. Jonas said we must forget it, that it had made us ill and that, until we’d forgotten it, we would not recover. Irva and I moved back into Grandfather’s house in Pult Street. Irva didn’t say very much. After we’d been there a few days she never mentioned the city again.
ABOUT THE ACTUAL city, they fixed the Central Post Office. They put Corinthian pillars at the front, taken from another building that had been more completely ruined, they put metal counters inside. It barely resembled our old post office at all, but at least the old steps were still there. What a confusion the postal service was in in those days. Which address exists, which doesn’t? Postmen, people who before had known their individual parts of the city so well, would come back asking where such and such a street was, they couldn’t find it anywhere. A new postmaster came from a nearby town. He was a man who had no understanding or love for Entralla, to him it was always the mound of rubble the earthquake had made of it.
I was frequently confused about the city. I’d stop still in the street sometimes, just stalled there, looking about, not really knowing where I was going. Nobody recognised me as I wandered Entralla, I would have to have been with Irva to be recognised. There is nothing particularly exceptional about a twin alone without her sister, even if she does have a North sign upon her forehead, or a map hidden beneath her clothes.
So we just stayed in Grandfather’s house mostly. Jonas did try to get us to come with him and he did look after us well, and occasionally set Irva talking again, but we couldn’t find the energy to go anywhere anymore, nor barely to look out of the window, not when everything out there was such a mess, not when we recognised so little of it, not when it made no sense. Endless days, surviving on Grandfather’s money and Jonas’s rent, days without purpose. And always we felt so tired.
We would never have survived without Jonas. He was always there, holding our hands, brushing our hair, cleaning up after us. He even bought plasticine for Irva when she asked for it again.
I returned to my old vague dreams of travelling and began to spend hours in Grandfather’s bathroom flopped naked in front of the mirror. I talked again of other countries and other faraway customs. Sometimes Irva would let me walk her up and down the street, once Jonas even carried her piggyback all the way up Prospect Hill, from the fortress she looked out but she didn’t seem to see anything.
And then she started building miniature 27 Veber Streets.
27 VEBER STREETS. One after the other. When we told her it was time to eat she’d shuffle into the kitchen, shovel the meal down her, mutter, ‘Thank you’, and as quickly as she could, shuffle out again. I saw her on so many occasions staring so seriously at those models of 27 Veber Street, as if she were wondering how to get inside. Jonas and I took her to Veber Street once, wondering if that would help. I do not know whether it was because our home was boarded up or because of the ‘DANGER’ signs written about it, but for whatever reason Irva didn’t seem to recognise our old home at all. And she carried on, day after day, building more and more 27 Veber Streets. She even started to place them together, she made streets of them and then, one day, she embarked on her final city of plasticine.
ON THE USEFULNESS OF PLASTICINE BUILDINGS 3: SEARCHING. Even now I cannot regard the third and final exhibit in Gallery 24 without upset, for it is upsetting let there be no doubt about that. It is a city that can only conjure negative feelings. It is an evil, mean, limited place. If this city were to have inhabitants, they would surely one and all be shifty, suspicious people filled with disquiet and malevolence. They would range from petty thieves to habitual murderers. If there were any children there, they would be secretive and awkward, they would have imaginary friends who would constantly get the better of them. It is a city composed of hurt and self-neglect. On a first sighting you may assume that I am a man subject to gross exaggerations, for it will likely seem to you that there is nothing particularly upsetting about this model. It is set out, plausibly enough, like many another city; it has patterns of streets, squares, boulevards and parks—it is in fact based upon the city of Entralla. But as your studying becomes more thorough, you will see that this entire city consists only of one building, endlessly repeated. On this city’s version of Cathedral Square there is no cathedral, but only, once again, that same house, always the same size no matter what building it has usurped, and in the place of the bell tower and baptistery again you see that same house. On the top of this city’s Prospect Hill there is no Lubatkin’s Tower but only that same house. That same house in every road, street, square. You may initially have thought this was a curious city, amusing possibly, but you’ll soon find the repetition makes you nervous, you demand that something be different, but it never is, you see, not there. It is that same note played over and over again, the same note as you look through those streets rising in volume, until it fails to amuse you, it nauseates you, it disgusts you. In an effort to make your thoughts consider something new, you perhaps begin to wonder why this city was built, you begin to think of the person who built it. You see her now, all alone, day after day, constructing the same house over and over again. How long, you wonder now, did it take to construct? Eight months. Eight whole months with nothing but that same house day after day, week after week, month after month. Her dreams, you suppose, and you suppose correctly, must have been visited by that same house, by multitudes, armies, empires of that same house, with nothing to disturb it, to break the distressing monotony of that awful sameness, because as she runs in her nightdress in her nightmares down ill lit streets, she would come across in her horrifying trauma a vast and endless maze consisting solely of that same house.
AFTER THERE were hundreds of 27 Veber Streets (each less accurate than the first) to be found all over the house; after she’d completed her mock-city; after we couldn’t move for 27 Veber Streets, a new and final stage came over Irva. She started building tiny cubes, endless lines of cubes perfectly formed, all the same size.
‘What is it, Irva? What are you trying to tell us?’ But by then she had stopped speaking. She just pointed to those cubes, or would earnestly hold them up to us. Later she’d come in to see Jonas or me in our separate rooms, or together in his, and would give us a cube, ‘Thank you, Irva,’ we’d always say, ‘thank you very much.’ She’d smile, kiss us both, and leave the room. When those cubes had grown
dust Irva would take them away again, she’d crush them and replace them with new ones. And it was only later, much later, that I understood that Irva’s cubes represented a single room. She was building again and again a single solitary room. This woman who built cities, this woman who it seemed to me could construct whole worlds, this woman had now reduced herself to a single, tiny, cube-shaped chamber.
And then she stopped building altogether.
And then she sat still all day, quite useless, and wouldn’t be encouraged.
‘Hello, Irva, come back wherever you are.’
THE DOCTORS visited her, they said ‘nervous exhaustion’ and gave her some pills. The pills seemed to make no difference, she still sat there, looking but not seeing. I built again for her, I built miniature cathedrals and opera houses, I built fortresses and post offices, I built homes. She held them in her hands a while until her wrists became tired and they fell to the floor. She was lost inside herself, and I couldn’t get her out. I showed her photographs, a copy of Mother’s book on baby care, Grandfather’s matchstick models, I showed her my map, I placed her hands upon my map but they only slipped off again. ‘Come back, Irva, come back, please. Where’ve you gone? Where is it that you are now?’