Alva and Irva

by Edward Carey

  IT WAS the second earth tremor which made me finally understand. For who could argue with the vastness of a whole city shaking? How could a single person, no matter how tall, argue with that? As the city trembled, as buildings many times my size—so solid yesterday but now as frail and unconfident as old men—swayed in the tremor’s wind, yes, as the surface moved, came the deep suspicion, the terrible worry, the suffocating thought that even though I was everywhere I would be going nowhere. The earthquake had made me realise that I was Alva. That I was only Alva. That was all. So there I was again, shrunken to the size of Alva Lina Dapps.

  AND THESE are the actions that surrounded my shrinking.

  I was in my bedroom when the earthquake struck. Mother wrenched open the door to see if I was safe. I lay on my bed, my nightdress wrinkled up above my knees. Mother saw my tattoo. Mother saw a good portion of South Africa, and in that instant South Africa changed from being South Africa into an insult. And it was then that I shrank, I diminished in front of the slowly comprehending, and ever widening, face of Mother. Mother, mouth stretched, turned herself into a siren. She shrieked and screamed so much that Irva rushed herself into my room; she wailed so much and bellowed so loudly that some good people of Veber Street even came running, fearing some earthquake mischief. They pounded the front door open in their eagerness to enact neighbourly assistance, they clambered up the stairs in a crowd of altruism—the sound of which returned Irva immediately to her room before they had quite ascended—yes, they hurled themselves into my bedroom and it was only then, I suppose, it was only when they had halted, that they understood that the screams of Mother, which they had at first believed to be screams of distress, were in fact screams of vituperation. And they saw Mother, the siren, deafening with alarm, now about her daughter, pulling the nightdress from her, revealing, here and there, more bits and pieces of the world, for a second Australia was visible, until my determined hand forced the nightdress back down me and then perhaps it was time for Portugal to make a hurried appearance as Mother’s thick digits went assessing the magnitude of the damage, or even a second of Canada or a flicker of India. And as the good people of Veber Street saw the whereabouts of these countries momentarily exposed, they began to understand that that tangle of arms and legs and shrieks and flinches was a jumble consisting of a distressed mother and a frightened daughter, and that such a thing was meant really only to be witnessed by the distressed mother and frightened daughter, and so they gradually began, all altruistic tendencies vanished, to descend the stairs of 27 Veber Street and even to collect themselves in a scrum of mutterings on the pavement in front of our house. And last to leave my bedroom was Miss Stott the tailor, who had entered our home empty-handed but was leaving it considerably burdened by yet another tale of Veber Street life which she would later whisper to her evolving suits and dresses.

  MOTHER WOULD be permanently ashamed now whenever she stepped out into Veber Street—which she did every day. She would never be able to shrug off that shame because as she walked hunched over down Veber Street it seemed to her that she could see a certain memory working inside the heads of all those neighbours of ours. And I too now avoided our neighbours, even Miss Stott, because I knew that they did not have the ability inside them to comprehend why it was that I had the world drawn into me. They could only see that there was something surely wrong, some deficiency in me which had caused such a thorough piece of self-abuse. And in their quick and fascinated and disapproving looks, and in the stories they afterwards told to those who hadn’t been there, stories which were surely daily distorted, somehow the colours of my tattoo began to dirty; those blues and greens and yellows and oranges and browns seemed somehow soiled now, grimed by their exposure.

  I was a girl who lived in a street in a city, tattooed and unhappy. From nowhere in particular. Going nowhere in particular. A young woman who, walking down certain streets of her city for the rest of her life, was certain to cause other people to point her out, ‘There, that’s the girl who has the whole world drawn on her.’ Locally infamous.

  GRANDFATHER SAID, ‘She’s ruined herself.’

  Mother wouldn’t look at me unless I was fully clothed.

  Irva came to visit.

  TWO NIGHTS after the tremor, Irva came to my bedroom to find me desperately scratching, feverishly trying to scrape the mocking tattoo from me, naked, but for the world, in agony and upset.

  She took hold of me in her bony arms. She held tight. And in that grip, the strength of which shocked me, I could feel our hearts working stronger, beating in recognition. So fast. So strong. And I gave in, I gave in at once, of course I did, I gave in as soon as I felt the engine of Alvairva stirring into life again, I gave in, I gave in, I couldn’t stop myself. And Irva, a faith rising inside her, our reunion putting some little sound back into her, a piece of hope, whispered, barely audibly: ‘My sister, the lonely planet.’

  I belong to her, she belongs to me. That’s just how it is, that’s just how it is and there’s nothing to be done about it. As if we were condemning ourselves to each other for ever.

  11INCIDENTALLY—Gita’s Indian Raja on Glass Street, tel. 316 32 47, still the only Indian restaurant in Entralla.

  12SPECIAL OFFER. Mr Mikel has been pleased to announce that a reduction of 20 per cent will be awarded any foreign customers who appear in his shop carrying Alva & Irva: The Twins Who Saved a City. He has even been so generous to add that the first foreign visitor to enter holding this book, will be given, entirely free of charge, but of course only if wished for, and wherever on the body requested, the following proclamation as a tattoo: ‘I ♥ ENTRALLA’.

  THE CITY

  IN A HOUSE

  The Plasticine City of Entralla

  Gallery 25 of the Art Museum of Entralla, No. 1 Arsenal Street, is filled in the minds of many Entrallans with the Eighth Wonder of the World; others consider it, however, more modestly, merely a Spectacular Site of Entralla. Gallery 25 itself, taking up much of the third floor, directly beneath the great glass dome, is the largest room in the museum and was designed specifically to hold this extraordinary work of art. It boasts a special climate carefully regulated to provide moisture and sufficient breeze to stop the miniature city drying out or gathering dust. The railings around the city’s perimeter are to prevent the public from too much intimacy, but do take a visit to the upper gallery from which the city can be viewed from above in all its complicated totality, illuminated by the sky.

  IT COULD NEVER be pretended, even for a moment, despite our reunion, that all was as it had been before the Central Train Station Adventure.

  When I had drawn on my forehead, when the map had been written on my body, I’d so hurt Irva that she had sought a hiding place deep within herself. To find that place she had abandoned words and limited movement, until she reached an internal home so void of light, of such dank depression, so compact in its space, that she felt safe again. And now it was my task to carefully draw her out, in delicate stages, and with loving precision, lest she be permanently lost inside herself, lest I lose her and in doing so lose myself. I clung desperately to her, for she was, as I realise now, always and forever, my only company.

  So time was all Irva again. Irva days and Irva nights, Irva hours and Irva minutes. I wouldn’t leave her. I was her nurse, her constant nurse. I wouldn’t allow Mother or Grandfather near, I pushed them away. I fed her, I brushed her hair, I washed her. She, in her turn, lubricated my map. We slept together in the same bed, in case she called out in the night.

  So there we were, falling in love again.

  Children say to each other that somewhere in the world there is someone who exactly resembles you, and if you ever see that person, your double, you’ll fall down dead on the spot. But what happens if you were born with your double. What then? Alternatively, so Irva might say, I should consider how sad it was for all those other people, those countless twinless people, perpetually alone; who’ll never really know what real togetherness is like. We were m
arried, Irva and I. We even had a kind of marriage ceremony.

  I measured the scar on my forehead and its exact position there. With a soft pencil I drew the mark in the precise sister location on Irva’s forehead. I took out my school compass. While I held her heavy head steady, she did the deep scratching: the arrow, the ‘N’ for ‘North’. Such eagerness, such passion in this new task of hers. Poor, tearful mother couldn’t understand. She never could. Some nights I unpicked Irva’s scab for her.

  When Irva and I were alone, and mostly we were alone, I would encourage her to trace her fingers across my map of the world. I would whisper to her, ‘One day, Irva, perhaps we’ll walk up Terminus Road into the train station and take the first train and go, just go and never look back.’ ‘But where will we go?’, she whispered—and she only ever whispered. ‘Anywhere,’ I said to her, ‘anywhere, right arm, left leg.’ But we scarcely left the bedroom. Irva seemed to think that since I’d brought the whole world into Entralla, into Veber Street, that there was really no need for us to go anywhere else. Her voice may have returned but she was not yet ready to leave the house, she clung to her timidity.

  I began to model for Irva plasticine buildings as gifts. To begin with that was all that she supposed they were, but in time she began to understand my great cunning. These buildings, Lubatkin’s Fortress, the Central Post Office, Grandfather’s house on Pult Street were given to Irva to remind her of what lay beyond 27 Veber Street. I was slowly trying to bring her back. Sometimes I’d even ask her to help me smooth out a wall or carve out windows or shape roofs. I said to Irva, ‘Since you won’t go out into the world, even out into Entralla, I’ll bring it in here to you.’ I’d win her back with plasticine buildings.

  Some nights I’d catch her, tears in her eyes, gently touching those soft buildings, leaving her prints on their walls, or on other occasions looking out through the curtains into the Entrallan night, so close and yet so alien to her. She was trying so hard, her effort was such a painful thing to see, but she could not, she could not yet go outside, the very thought of it set her trembling again, sent her under the covers into her blackness. But she was, there could be no doubt about this, attempting to trick herself into trusting again. And she bravely began to build once more, to consider what it was that lay beyond our home.

  I BOUGHT A CHEAP camera, I took photographs of Entralla streets so that Irva’s miniatures could be more accurate.

  After we had between thirty and forty plasticine buildings dotted around the attic, it all became clear. It was Irva who suggested it. We should build the whole city. I would bring it to her, building by building, street by street, the entire city of Entralla. With each new street safe in our home, how she’d recover, how she’d expand, how she’d slowly be encouraged outside once more. We would make a great detailed census. We would build a great plasticine model of the city of Entralla, not of a little section of it but of all of it, every street, every building. And we would find the nearest plasticine colour to each building, all those greys and browns and blues and whites and reds, all the parks would be of green plasticine, we would make a multicoloured Entralla, all the colours of Entralla! I would collect the information. Irva would build.

  ‘And when it’s finished,’ Irva whispered, ‘then I’ll go out again, then I’ll be ready, then I’ll know what to expect. And perhaps, but you must be patient with me, perhaps we could even, and only after a time, and only perhaps, perhaps we could travel beyond Entralla, but only if we take Entralla with us, so we shan’t be homesick. Yes, we must always have it with us. Yes, yes, this is it: Entralla in miniature in our trunks and suitcases. Yes. Yes.’

  THE PLASTICINE CITY would be divided up into thirty-centimetre-by-thirty-centimetre squares. Each square a manageable size, small enough to fit within boxes or cases. Beneath each plasticine square would be a chipboard platform (thirty centimetres by thirty centimetres); I bought these chipboard squares ready-cut from the hardware store on Pilias Street. We were determined. Upstairs in the attic, the city began to grow, every day we saw it growing.

  First of all Irva built Prospect Hill and then she crowned it with the Lubatkin Tower.

  At the foot of the hill she began to build the cathedral. And as she built the plasticine replica, she tried to imagine just how it was for those ancient Entrallan builders. Each year they would have seen the cathedral growing higher and higher and perhaps wondered whether one day Heaven itself would be reached. Pinnacles, gables and flying buttresses. How long it took them, nearly two hundred years! (It took Irva nearly three weeks.) Sometimes as she sculpted the cathedral, in honour of the Holy Spirit, which smells of incense, I would light up a joss stick to help her into the mood. The cathedral is the single largest building in all Entralla, from it we would judge the scale of everything else.

  After the cathedral’s completion Irva’s thoughts began to consist only of the old town. She was a Baroque and Renaissance Irva then.

  The University of Entralla took up exactly six chipboard squares.

  When she reached Terminus Street, she wouldn’t build the Central Train Station, I had to do that.

  ON SUNDAYS, Jonas Lutt used to come, he missed our chats together. He had been away from Entralla during the small quake, and the news of my tattoo, presumably passed on by some garrulous neighbour, seemed only to encourage his visits. He asked me to show him the tattoo, I politely refused. ‘One day,’ he said, ‘one day you’ll show me. Won’t you, Alva?’ I smiled. Irva decided she couldn’t stand Jonas.

  Jonas never stayed very long, he’d sit by the progressing city up in the attic and list numbers of motorways. Irva ignored him, she continued working away, those names meant nothing to her. On about the third Sunday, when I remember Jonas was wearing a T-shirt which said ‘ANNE FRANKHUIS, AMSTERDAM’, he announced, ‘When visiting friends it is generally understood that you arrive with several bottles of beer or even a single bottle of wine, when visiting girlfriends it is generally understood that you arrive holding a bunch of delicately perfumed flowers, when you visit Alva and Irva Dapps it must be understood that you come bearing plasticine.’ And then he held out a block of red plasticine, which Irva refused to build with.

  Jonas never had any problems in telling us one from the other, he joked that I was the twin in colour, and that Irva was the twin in black and white, as if Irva’s withdrawal from the world had included a withdrawal from colour.

  Sometimes when Jonas came we wouldn’t have time for his magnificent travelling stories, sometimes they’d upset Irva. She was frightened that I might be tempted away. On those occasions, Mother would make him tea or coffee and they’d sit together for hours in the kitchen, Mother patiently listening to Jonas’s international lists.

  IRVA BUILT the Financial District of Entralla, and the Television Tower, which immediately dominated the plasticine Entrallan skyline. From the top of the Television Tower, where there is a revolving restaurant that allows you to view all three hundred and sixty degrees of Entralla as you eat, and which I visited as I was making notes on the Financial District, I saw how far our model was from completion. I muttered to myself and to all the vastness of the city, ‘It is a truth: Entralla, whether of stone or plasticine, was not built in a day.’ And still Irva seemed so far from ready to leave. She happily modelled buildings but did she really understand that these buildings actually existed just a little distance from where she was working away?

  Now as I studied Entralla everyday, as I saw Irva carefully modelling it, I felt I was understanding our city for the first time. The more Irva built the more I understood, the more it became our home. The city was reduced to combinations of spheres, oblongs, squares and cylinders, such limited choices. Irva was endlessly cutting these shapes, the angles of people’s lives. Sometimes as she worked crouched over with her sharp knives and disobedient plasticine she’d prick her finger and a little blood would fall down onto a street.

  With the buildings so reduced how much sympathy we had for the people of Entrall
a now. The smallness sometimes even made us cry: buildings no bigger than a fingernail; lives, then, smaller still. Irva cut out windows in plasticine walls, for without windows how could the people look in or out. She carved out doors too, all the doorways of Entralla. We feared for our city, the slightest jog of the trestle tables would set the buildings trembling, disturbing our hearts. We would often climb the attic stairs during the night to check that it was safe, we dreamt troubled nights of squashed buildings. We taped over the windows in the attic with black bin liners to stop dust and to keep out the sun which overheated our plasticine. We inspected the attic ceiling weekly, looking for hairline cracks, we added braces to the tables’ legs. Our profoundest instinct in those days: to protect.

  SOMETIMES THE old yearning would come back to me and with it, impatience. On those days I would cautiously visit the travel agencies again, always, during the city’s lunch breaks, when the agencies were at their busiest. One afternoon I stole something from a display in an agency shop front. It fitted into my uniform pocket easily enough, I felt it belonged there, it seemed happy enough, and then I rushed out of the shop and ran whooping with delight through those so familiar streets. The object that I stole was a green plastic, fifteen-centimetre-tall souvenir of the Statue of Liberty.