Alva and Irva (20 page)

W
HEN
M
OTHER
was gone Grandfather came to visit us again. We hadn’t seen him for many months. When he saw Irva he said, ‘This
has got to stop, this has to stop. Neglect, that’s what it is. Pure and simple neglect.’ He tried to come close to her, I stood in his way. ‘When did you last go outside, Irva? How long is it since you were last out? You can’t stay locked up in here, it isn’t right. It’s not right.’ We didn’t answer of course. ‘You’re coming out now, you’re coming out this minute.’ He pushed past me and took Irva’s hand, he was going to force her out. ‘Don’t touch her!’ I warned, ‘Don’t touch her!’ But Grandfather wouldn’t listen, so I had to bite him, so I had to kick him and pull at his grey hair. And he was too old for us now and he couldn’t beat us. He slipped down to the floor and when he was down there we both kicked him. He managed to scramble out of the house, his nose was bleeding slightly. I slammed the door. He sat on the doorstep for a while, I watched him through the keyhole, holding his handkerchief to his nose. Then he stood up, carefully brushed down his post office uniform and went away.

W
HEN
M
OTHER
came back, only two days later, we pretended we hadn’t missed her. She gave us identical T-shirts saying ‘
FRANKFURT AM MAIN
’ (Irva never wore hers), but she hadn’t actually seen the city itself, only a depot on the outskirts. She showed me endless photographs of motorways, and foreign people in foreign motorway cafés.

I
N ALL THE CIRCLES
of Outer Entralla there were so many unremarkable streets, each seeming first cousin to the last, so much similarity that I sometimes found myself confused. And so now for the first time, just to make sure, I began to claim a little piece of every street or square in that place called Outer Entralla, so threatening in its vastness. I began to take a screwdriver with me always and as soon as I’d finished noting down or photographing a street, when no one was looking, I’d do my version of cocking legs to mark territory. I scratched onto the surface of brick or concrete at one end of the street, small autographs. I scraped: ‘A & I’. It seemed only right since the plasticine buildings had Irva’s fingerprints all over them, that I should mark them too.

How Irva missed me when I was away, how she sat at home waiting for my return. A life made up of anxious waiting. Each time
I was gone she’d be unable to stop herself from imagining me dead, somewhere far from Veber Street, helpless Alva dead on a pavement.

Every day it took me longer and longer to reach new sites, every day I had to travel so far. But on I’d go, onwards and onwards, so that the city could be built. I was out so far, I hardly knew where I was, but still these distant streets were a part of Entralla, still these people called themselves Entrallans. To think of all those Entrallans I had seen over the years! All those many Entrallans I had passed—the weight of seeing so many people, the endless busy numbers of them. The inertia they cause, how many little fragments of conversations I had heard, how many different shadows of words from behind doors and windows, how many times I had heard other people’s telephones ringing inside other people’s houses, how many times I had heard people fucking at each other (for there are only a limited number of things humans can do together), how many condoms I had seen wrinkled in the streets, how many car alarms I had started as I walked Entralla, how many dirtied syringes with rusting needles I’d passed, how much I’d seen, the weight of collecting everyone, causing me such tiredness, such sadness.

And all the rooms of our home were filling up, from Central Entralla on the trestle tables in the attic to all the other boxes of streets and districts in every room in the house. All those boxes and boxes of Entralla! We were running out of space to put them, where could we fit them all? Where could they all be put? We worried more and more about space. The model had reached so far from Central Entralla that we had finally come upon the endless tall lines of the high-rise homes, cruel space upon cruel space. But where could we house these tower blocks of ours in 27 Veber Street? The spare bedroom, my old room, was completely full (on the bed, under the bed, around the bed), and even Mother’s room was half filled with boxes of Outer Entralla (a whole half of the room cut off now by stacks of boxes) and some of the kitchen too, but we had been careful to leave a corridor between boxes, paths to the cooker, to Father’s stool. And all those boxed were marked,
DO NOT TOUCH. DO NOT TOUCH
written all about the house. We had no choice, we had to pile them up, these towers, one on top of the other, and store them
in their boxes in the cellar, out of sight, where we didn’t have to look at them every day (just like the city planners).

And the city kept on changing, challenging us to keep up, old houses would be knocked down and new houses would be built on streets we had already completed. And so we would have to study that street again, add the new buildings. The city kept on changing, it wouldn’t keep still.

I
N SUMMER
the greenflies and the mosquitoes and the house flies would come. They always knew where to find us. Mother would open the front door or leave windows open in the kitchen, and up they’d come. We’d watch them walk over our city, we’d see a hunched mosquito poised on some rooftop, we’d see a fat fly walking blackly, arrogantly down a boulevard. They’d swoop and hum around our ears, we’d long to crush them, we’d yearn to squash them against hard surfaces but we couldn’t, we mustn’t, we had to let them fly about us for fear, in our anger, some building, some precious square or even a humble plasticine pavement might be dented through our vengeance. We longed to kill them but we had to be patient, above all else we must keep patient. Can it be imagined how much patience is required to build a city? I bought fly papers. Our victims screamed and twitched on the sticky strips as we worked on beneath them, stopping occasionally to look up and smile.

But it was not only insects that we grew to fear. One winter came a new terror. When we were carefully checking through all the stacked boxes, as we happened to on irregular intervals, we came across one—of sector five including much of Bernadinn Street—which had a hole in its side. Something had eaten its way into the box, we could see scratch marks, teeth marks even. We placed the box on a table, and, trembling, lifted the lid. The horror of it! Poor Irva had to look away, had to sit down with her head between her legs immediately. The intruder had left its footprints all the way up Bernadinn Street; it had pressed its pestilential way deep into our carefully smoothed plasticine, it had casually pottered pitted footprints upon our work. But there was worse still: it had defecated along the streets, small lozenges of brown shit on our city! And
worse of all, worse even than the shit, wrapped up in the corner of Bernadinn and Duvis Streets, at least where the corner had once been, for there was no remnance of it left, was the offending creature itself, curled up in a bed consisting of torn shreds of the persecuted box.

A mouse, if you please.

When woken, it fled through sector five, causing yet more damage, then leapt from the box and into the darkness.

We bought poison, we bought mousetraps. We raised our boxes from the ground using wooden boards and bricks, we carefully inspected them everyday. We cheered when we found a hairy corpse, twisted on the floor. We felt no pity for its pain or for its tininess. Its length after all, including tail, equalled a quarter of many of our smaller streets.

N
OW THAT WE
had reached the furthest streets of Outer Entralla, Irva began to slow. As soon as I was out of the house she ceased modelling. She’d lie on her bed staring at the curtained window. Before, so much into her stride had she advanced with plasticine fashioning, it would have taken her a mere day to complete a complex building; now, with shaking hands, she hovered over plasticine blocks. She’d spend half a week on the simplest of structures. She knew that we were nearing the end and she was terrified of it. Sometimes, in practice, she’d allow me to place Father’s stool in the hall passageway and she’d sit, looking at the door, sometimes she’d even walk up to it, but never close enough to touch. She’d look at maps of all Entralla and try to estimate precisely how much time she had left. The closer we came to finishing the more desperate she grew. To slow our progress still further she would secretly destroy buildings and blame it on the mice. She’d pick at random some innocent home and obliterate it with a scalpel, attempting with those tiny slicing marks to copy the claws of mice. If she was challenged, she denied it vehemently, she acted appalled that I even suspected her for a moment. She’d sulk, ‘How could you think that, Alva, how could you?’ She’d look at me, so sorrowful, ‘That you could even think
such a thing.’ And then for a while no mice, real or fictional, would approach the boxes until her terror at completion grew too much for her once more. She’d wake me up in the middle of the night. ‘Listen,’ she’d say, ‘Listen. Can you hear that? Sssh, you’re being too noisy! Ach, it’s stopped now. It was a mouse scraping away. There’s a mouse between the walls. I’m certain of it. You would have heard it, you would have done if you hadn’t made so much noise as you sat up.’ But there never was any mouse there.

I
T IS SIMPLY
a fact that some people long to travel the entire world, and do not flinch from nights in wild forests or from the heat of the desert or from the anger of a tempest. It is simply a fact that some men long to climb the loftiest of mountains, others to explore the harshness of Antarctica, others still to circumnavigate the world in hot-air balloons. Why do they do it? For the challenge, we are expected to believe. And the newspapers and the journalists will not shut up about these people. But there are other, more modest people, whom for the most part the journalists avoid, who are frightened to step out into a street. It is a fact that it is too challenging for them. They cannot do it. This latter group of people, who almost always exist in solitude, are so panicked by the world that they close themselves up inside houses, inside rooms, and never leave again. The longer they stay inside the harder it is for them to peer out; they may be brave enough at first to touch door handles but very soon it will be impossible for them to turn them.

S
UFFICIENT PLASTICINE
construction has now been accomplished for me to arrive at a certain significant date: 15 July. To be precise, to arrive at the eve of Irva’s excursion, on the day before she’d leave 27 Veber Street. On this day then, this unhappy day, heir to such misery, on this day perhaps six weeks before the plasticine city would have been completed, on this day, this day when I came home, predictably enough, from Outer Entralla, on this day, here goes then, on this day I found Mother had been cleaning the house in preparation for Jonas Lutt who was coming to supper.

Many of the boxes were in different places.

In different orders.

One had even been turned upside down.

S
HE APOLOGISED
of course, she kept on apologising. But we shrieked at her. And we opened the box which had been turned upside down and thrust the dented plasticine streets in front of Mother’s face. And we crushed those dented buildings in front of her, pounded them with our fists in our exasperation, me strongly, Irva weakly, until Mother began weeping and even ran out of our house and up to Jonas’s. And then a few hours later, after we had calmed a little and were slowly reordering our work, Jonas and Mother came in and Jonas started to tell us that we had been wrong to speak to Mother like that and we nearly turned savage with anger, and I said, ‘Get him out, this is not his house, what’s he doing in here?’ And Jonas said we were being cruel and selfish. ‘Cruel and selfish?’ I said, and showed him the deformed and hunchbacked, misshapen plasticine streets of Entralla. But he didn’t understand, he didn’t understand at all. ‘It’s only plasticine,’ he said. ‘Wrong!’ we yelled. And then I picked up Father’s stool and asked Mother, ‘What’s this?’ And she said, ‘You know very well it’s your father’s stool, don’t play games.’ And then Irva pointed at Jonas and said, ‘What’s that? That’s not our father, what’s he doing in our home?’ And Jonas said he’d come back later and Irva yelled, she actually yelled, ‘Come back never!’ Mother began to cry again, and then Jonas took her by the hand and out of the kitchen and even out of 27 Veber Street. ‘Come on, Dallia,’ he said, ‘come home with me. You shouldn’t stay here in this place, Dallia, with these creatures, come away.’
Dallia?
we thought for a moment,
who was this Dallia?
And then we remembered that Dallia was Mother’s name. And then we wondered if she was to be called only Dallia now and never to be called Mother ever again. ‘Come on Dallia,’ Jonas had said, ‘come home with me.’ And then Mother, or Dallia, left. In fact mother, or Dallia, slept the night at Jonas’s. We waited for her, we sat in the attic all night with the hatch open,
waiting for her return. We were still there waiting for her when the morning came.

Not so clever, Alva and Irva.

I
T WASN’T
anyone’s fault, not really. Something extraordinary was beginning to happen, something had begun to fill everyone in Entralla with discomfort. When Mr Irt had told us in school that humans are insensitive to earthquakes we think now that he was telling lies. The day before, when the edginess was just beginning, I had witnessed Louis in his café in Market Square, smashing all his glasses and his cups, one after the other, hurling them onto the floor, and then pummelling the body and the face of Kurt Laudus. And from there, or so it seemed to me, the discomfort grew worse, it spread, multiplied, filled every street and home until everyone could feel it, but most people put it down to tiredness or nerves, or drinking too much coffee or the humid weather. But they were wrong, it was 15 July and no one realised then exactly what that meant. The animals knew though.

All round the city that early morning before Mother had moved the boxes, the hair on the body of every cat began to rise. Their backs arched and they started hissing. There was nothing that any human eye could see to make them so tense. But everywhere in Entralla domestic cats began to leave their homes. There were reports the next day that not a single cat could be found in the entire city.