Alva and Irva

by Edward Carey

  I HAD MARKED myself with my school compass, I had deliberately separated myself from Irva. And Irva almost immediately had started sneezing. Then she got the shivers. Then she stayed at home. Then she stopped speaking.

  They gave her some pills, she never went anywhere around the house without her bottle of pills, their rattling always betraying a change in her location, but mostly she would be found scrunched up on her bed facing the wall. Her capacity for sleep in those days was enormous.

  I was ordered to sleep in the next-door bedroom. Mother gathered up my things, one half of everything inside the room, an identical half, an exact half, and deposited it in the spare room. A stranger visiting our house that day could be forgiven, as the tour of our home progressed, for believing that he had seen the same room twice. Irva tried to keep back some of my objects by hiding them under the bed or in our old wardrobe or by clinging to them. Mother was ruthless. Mother vacuumed the room, and dusted thoroughly. And so Irva was left in her Irva territory, existing only of Irva. It was for the good, Mother told her, imitating Grandfather, when she wailed. I closed the door to my new bedroom, I sat on my bed. All this is mine, I thought, only mine, I shan’t allow anyone else inside. ‘This,’ I whispered, looking about me, ‘is private property.’ And I vowed I’d change and expand the contents of my little kingdom until it in no way resembled the contents of that Irva-land so close by. As I sat in my room that day I thought of August Hirkus in some equivalent room far away in Canada.

  After Mother divided our property, and set us Berlin-like, in different worlds, Grandfather, as some kind of privileged ambassador, wandered throughout the house, not commenting on the great change, but noticing it profoundly. He tried to cheer things along with his onwards-onwardsness, but it never worked. And he could never bear to stay for very long. He tried to make light of the healing scab on my forehead, saying it was very helpful. Looking at the arrow pointing at the letter ‘N’, he would comment, ‘Alva Dapps, this way up’. Or sometimes he would call me ‘North’ and Irva ‘South’. But nobody even smiled and Mother opened the box of kitchen matches and began to snap one matchstick after another in half, so he soon got the message. So he soon shut up. So he soon went away again. But he would always leave by smiling at me and saying, ‘Alva, it’ll soon be September and then you’ll begin at the post office. In the meantime enjoy your holiday.’ But I never wanted that holiday, and when I told Grandfather I’d happily begin work immediately, he shook his head and told me I’d better wait. ‘Besides,’ he said, ‘by September that scar will be barely visible.’

  In those days I was experiencing my new independence. As I grew so Irva faded. The north sign had confirmed how fundamentally different I was from her. And I did not wish the wound to go away. Irva began to wear a woollen hat to cover her forehead. I began to pin my hair back with a multitude of hairclips. Sometimes Irva would fold up sheets of loo paper and tape them with plasters to her forehead, but these were halfhearted efforts which fooled no one. When a scab was formed I would painfully reopen it in the privacy of the bathroom. I clung desperately to my new independence. And it was only after my fourth of fifth visit to the doctor, with an insistent and distressed mother in the lead and with myself in tow, that the doctor said the following comforting truth, ‘I don’t know what it is that you’re trying to do, young lady. If you’d left your scab to heal naturally there’d hardly be a mark on your forehead, but now, and because of your protracted vandalism, you are sure to have a scar there for the rest of your life. I hope you’re proud of yourself.’

  Thank you, doctor. I was. And then I left my forehead to heal.

  MEANWHILE, OUTSIDE of the listless house, 27 Veber Street, it was hot, hopeful, sexy, thirsty summer. And out I went, out into new days!

  On Veber Street, on Sundays, I would always see the heavy man Jonas Lutt, the long-distance lorry driver who lived at no. 15, washing his car. I always looked out for Jonas’s T-shirts. Sometimes he would wear one which said, in German, ‘MUSEUM FÜR VOLKERKUNDE, HAMBURG’, or else, in Polish, ‘ZAMEK KROLEWSKI, WARSZAWA’, or else, in English, ‘DOVER BY NIGHT’, he had such a collection of T-shirts! I would stop to talk to Jonas every Sunday. It is true of many people that even when you’ve hardly met them they already begin telling you their life stories, as if to prove to you that they exist too. But also they insist on telling you where they’ve been: locations, locations. Everybody’s little verbal guidebook to their lives. And Jonas would tell me all about his job, about how the next day he was going to journey all the way to Germany, and he would list the names of the motorways he would be travelling on, that he’d be taking the E30 through Poznan, the A10 around Berlin, and then he’d be on the A9, and past Leipzig he’d join the A93 along Eisenberg, Plauen, Hof, Cheb, Swiebodzin, Fürstenwalde, Weiden and Schwandorf until finally he reached Regensburg, his destination, at the confluence of the Donau, Naab and Regen rivers. How I enjoyed the monologues of Jonas Lutt!

  Sometimes, I sat next to Mother in her post office counter on the wooden stool that Mother took there for its daily outing, licking the stamps for her, wearing aggressive looks for the benefit of the scaly Marta Stroud. Or I’d become a little lost wandering the city. I allowed myself to be upset by the growling of dogs chained up in yards, growls which instructed me to keep to my own part of the city. But slowly, slowly the city gave up its secrets to me, introducing me to tiny back streets which I had never known existed, revealing buildings which I must have passed countless times before but somehow had never seen. Entralla would sometimes sigh as I walked down a street and in its sigh it would introduce me to a balcony three stories up, brimming with extraordinary plants and pots or a small wooden house tucked between two brick ones or even a strangely shy mansion boasting two timid but muscly caryatids. When Entralla chooses to show itself, you must stop whatever it is that you are doing and allow the city to guide your eyes where it pleases, you must never continue on your journey saying to yourself that you will come back later, for when you do come back Entralla is sure to have withdrawn what it was earlier willing to reveal.

  In those new days, I liked to sit on benches in Ventis Park and wearing skimpy outfits let the sun warm into every part of me, with human life all around, swirling about, being sometimes busy, sometimes not busy at all, just lolling about, loving to loll. But eventually, I’d wander the too familiar route back home again, considering that in the city I’m a timid thing, perhaps a few centimetres shorter than my real self, but at home, well, I’m at home. There, even with Irva and her inconsolable gloom, or perhaps because of it, I achieved full Alva height (186 centimetres).

  And sometimes, when I was in Ventis Park, I might visit the zoo.

  OPTIONAL EXCURSION 2. ENTRALLA ZOO. A third of our city’s largest park, Ventis Park (trolley buses 7, 9, 14), is taken up with the City Zoo. If we lack human visitors from foreign countries we can at least boast animals from numerous foreign locations, but what sad faces they have, trudging dolefully around their limited homes. They can push their heads against bars and look across the way to see other animals, staring back at them from their cages, mirroring their own unhappy looks. Outside each of their cages are plastic signs with maps of the world on them, with a little patch of the world shaded red to indicate the region where each species originated. Elephants from Burma. Rhinos from Sumatra. Pigmy hippopotami from Liberia and Sierra Leone. Whale-headed storks from the swamps of East Africa. Giant anteaters from South Africa. Hamadryas baboons from Southern Arabia. Okapi from the Congo. Giraffes from the Sahara. Orangutans from Southeast Asia. A solitary, retiring aye-aye from Madagascar. They are all here, all these and many more.

  What noises they should make: sounds from all the corners of the world. But these animals, for the most part, have grown silent, have forgotten themselves, with their food provided and with their enemies if not out of sight then at least cages away, they spend their days dozing in the shade, sometimes whisking away a fly or two that they imagine should be hovering somewhere about
them, happy to ignore the children when they command them to come out of their huts to perform. Sometimes, it is possible to wander our zoo and barely see a single animal, and believe the zoo to be entirely deserted, but they are still there, the pot-bellied inhabitants are merely sleeping again, out of sight, dreaming perhaps of distant lands. So, to keep up the numbers of visitors, the zookeepers—every hour or so—encourage the beasts out of their stupor by lobbing food over the bars, or by putting children on top of Mongolian wild asses or Arabian dromedaries, or by bathing the elephants with brooms and hoses while the public look on in amazement at those great animals sitting on their huge backsides, resembling vast, naked old men with nose defects. It was here that Alva came and, walking from cage to cage, longed to break the locks, to set the animals free and to follow them all the way to their distant homes.

  IRVA, SO GRANDFATHER and Mother had decided, was not quite ready for work, she should be left a while longer to recover, but I was given a post office uniform, and I wore it proudly. And this metamorphosis in blue fitted me like a perfectly tailored membrane, a second skin, as intricately mine as my own fingerprints. It was to be not only my profession but my personality. The post office uniform was a thing stronger than me, and it made me stronger, because the post office uniform was a thing of great certainty, it represented conviction and confidence. And as I wore it about the city, I became a part of the city. I was no longer timid as I went about my business, which was also—the wonderful truth of it—the city’s business, now I was always at full Alva height. I was growing and blossoming. I was happy.

  Two weeks before September broke I was already dressed everyday in my post office uniform, proud of it, delighted by it, frequently seeking its reflection, terrified of dirtying it. Grandfather came to visit me, to inspect me, which was only right since I was part of his proud army now. But he did not come only to inspect me but also to bring me something. This object, my unceasing joy at it, had the insignia of the post horn thrice displayed upon it, and also upon its body were the words HI SPEED and PRO-FRAME. A bicycle!

  ‘Let’s see you on it,’ said Grandfather, ‘let’s see you up and down Veber Street, let’s see if you’re really post office material.’ The horror of it. The ignominy. The truth: I could not ride a bike. We are not born with the skill of bike-riding, none of us are, even those of us who will one day grow up to win that race of masochists, the Tour de France. Learning to ride a bike, once you have changed out of your post office uniform into something less sacred and once the saddle and the handle bars of the bicycle have been raised to their highest setting, contains the following ingredients: uncertainty, fear, perseverance, trust (in the teacher), betrayal (when the teacher first lets go of the bicycle), belief in the possibility of it, an intuitive understanding of the laws of gravity, desperation, exhilaration and plasters. Of course Grandfather knew I could not ride a bike. He had come to teach me. ‘And don’t suppose,’ he said, ‘I come calling on every one of my employees, don’t suppose I taught all my workers how to ride. You are a very privileged young lady.’ Indeed I was, I did not forget it. And I am very grateful to my grandfather for all the many things he taught me. But, to start with, I begged him, nearly tearful, not to let go of the bike as he trotted alongside me. Never to let go. And then he did. And after the third or fourth attempt, I understood that Grandfather was entirely right, it was all about letting go, letting go of fears and prejudices and shyness and allowing yourself the simple pleasure of breaking free, the joy of speed, the delight as the buildings lined up to rush past behind me. Look, look there: long girl on a bicycle, so high from the ground!

  And I was off, and there was no stopping me, up and down Veber Street, and then out into Pilias Street, and then to the great beyond that was waiting there for me, leaving Irva behind as she looked down onto Veber Street from the attic window. And I could hear Grandfather calling out to me, ‘You’ll do.’

  I, ALVA LINA DAPPS, took part in every form of written communication. If I was bad news one day delivering bills, then another day I might deposit a more happy missive, a letter of love perhaps. I kept things moving, I was one of the people who assured that we carried on being, I was all about movement. I posted, with absolute precision, pieces of outside inside. I was part of the great post office cog that helped to drive the vast machine of the city of Entralla.

  I BOUGHT A PADLOCK, I locked my bedroom, forbidding everyone entrance. Mother hated that lock; sometimes I would return from work to catch her sitting on Father’s stool in front of my bedroom door, regarding the lock suspiciously, wondering why. And beyond the lock? The walls of my bedroom were decorated with pages pulled from atlases and with coloured photographs of architecture taken from a book titled ‘FAMOUS BUILDINGS OF THE WORLD’ and with other pictures taken from library books or saved from newspapers.

  Sometimes I’d feel a sudden jolt of pain inside me as I worked around the city, delivering letters to my allotted portion of Entralla, and I knew that pain was because of Irva, and that pain I thought was the pain of us separating. She was barely my sister then, she had become something else, something that was built perhaps only of pain. When Mother or Grandfather demanded I spend more time with her, I’d leave the house. ‘Go up and see your sister,’ they’d say. When I refused they’d call it the cruellest neglect. I’d scoff, ‘I never asked to have a sister, did I?’

  But sometimes I would go and see her, sometimes I’d creep into her room at night. She always looked so pleased. I’d take hold of one of her hands, one of her bony and clammy hands, and press something into it, close the hand up again and leave. What did I press into her hands? Pieces of maps, shards of other lands. A torn section of Lurkistan in Iran, a ripped fraction of Flevoland from the Netherlands, a little paper gash of Beni from Bolivia. As a reminder that there were other places in the world, as a reminder that I would be leaving her. Sometimes I would open her mouth and place these crumbs of maps upon her tongue as if they were the body of Christ, and then close up her jaw and seal her nostrils and keep them sealed until she was forced to swallow. Sometimes I’d make her eat the whole of a continent in a single night. And since she never called out, since she didn’t speak, I was quite safe. Sometimes I’d insist that she drank up an ocean, that she chewed, for example, the entire Pacific, popping it into her, nautical mile after nautical mile. ‘Open up,’ I’d say, ‘open wide.’ For months this went on, and that dumb doll that was my sister never complained. Perhaps, when it was all over, Irva had succeeded in digesting the world several times over.

  IRVA’S SKIN seemed to me in those days thick with dust, and perhaps not just her skin, but all of her. A sister made of dust, dust face and skull, dust arms and legs, dust heart and lungs. If you blew on her then she would scatter into a thousand fragments. And she wanted to spread that dust onto me. And I wouldn’t let her.

  Every extra minute spent away from Veber Street seemed a kind of triumph to me. I longed to get out of the house and into the world. I would bicycle about the streets of the city, screaming out the names of other streets in contradiction, ‘Regent Street, Broadway, Boulevard Saint Germain.’ I’d revisit the library on People Street, coughing as I tore out the various pages that I could not bear to leave behind, pages which I might later force Irva to swallow, but after a time I was certain that the other readers in the library and the librarians were always watching me and I lost my nerve. Then I would spend my afternoons in travel agencies, leafing through brochures, marvelling at how wide the world was, imagining myself inside hotels, in front of castles, hiking through mountains. But the staff of those travel agencies quickly tired of me and, accusing me of dirtying and creasing their multi-coloured destinations, would send me back out onto the street, barring me from the world. So then I began to revisit the Central Train Station, looking nostalgically up at the ceiling, seeing the trains as they arrived and departed, trains that had travelled beyond the borders of our country into other lands where different people lived different lives. I would watch
those passengers arrive and depart with a silent envy. I would press my hands against train carriages, trying to learn from their touch the feeling of freedom. I would pick up train timetables and pin these to my bedroom walls also. I even once bought a train ticket and even stepped on a train, but the moment I sat down I began to sweat and tremble and had to clamber outside again, breathless and terrified. And what a look of resentment Irva gave me when I returned home that day. I wasn’t able to leave. Not then. Not yet. I couldn’t.

  THE PADLOCK on my bedroom door refused Mother sleep. It disturbed her. Now as she journeyed to the post office every morning, she could see locks everywhere, locks to people’s homes, locks to garages, locks to business premises. In the post office she regarded the numbered rows of boxes of those people that had their post delivered not to their home address but instead ordered it to wait for them in the post office hall itself. There’s so much secrecy in the city, Mother thought, everybody’s hiding something. Why can’t it be like it is in the country, she thought, where she’d heard that locks don’t exist, where people are accustomed to the far more sociable latch. The city was locking Mother out and she would not allow it. So one day she bought a hacksaw and went up the stairs to my bedroom. That evening, I came home to find Mother sitting outside our home on the entrance step. Miss Stott, I noticed, sat on her entrance step across the street, watching eagerly. ‘I’ve been waiting for you,’ Mother said. With tears in her eyes and matches in her hand, shaking the box in a very different way than Grandfather shook his matchstick boxes, she set light to my collection of photographs, some from books, some from newspapers and to my numerous train timetables, and to several tourist brochures and to sheaths of maps and whole countries from various atlases. And then our mother, burning the rubber soles of her slippers, did a little jig in the ashes. ‘No one is going anywhere,’ she said, ‘families must stick together.’ Mother rid the world of its maps, sending it in her efforts back to times before navigation—indeed, she would rather if Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama and James Cook had never been born, and if America, India and Australia had never been discovered; if they must exist, very well, let them exist, but not in her home. She would not have them there. It must be understood that in our Veber Street home the world beyond our city became as dark and unmapped as those many potential worlds beyond our galaxy.