by Edward Carey
NOW 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.
IT 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.
SUFFICIENT 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.
SHE 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.
IT 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.
In St Lekk’s monastery on the outskirts of our city, in the monastery garden, lived five pigs. Happy, bloated, contented things. But on the morning of that 15 July the swine began to grunt and snort and squeal louder than ever before. The monks rushed out to discover why the beasts were so noisily disturbing their devotions, and when they returned with ashen faces the abbot was called for. The abbot was a gentle and sensible man not usually given to speculation, but what he saw that morning turned his stomach and his brains. What he saw he termed an omen of ill luck, a sign from above, a warning. The pigs had begun to eat each other.
On the evening of 15 July, while we yelled and screamed at our tearful mother, the animals in Ventis Park Zoo were panicking. The tigers were circling their cages, and leaping at the bars. The gorillas had taken hold of their cage walls and were trying to shake them apart. Monkeys moved with urgent rapidity, up and down, left and right, shrieking as if they were on fire. By nightfall even the most docile of creatures, the sloth, was active, shifting up and down its branches as quickly as its thick body would allow. The giraffes—usually such calm and graceful beasts—were sprinting, running at their tall cages, bruising and bloodying their chests. Lions roared, elephants trumpeted, sea lions honked, snakes spat, orangutans thrashed, zebras whinnied, camels hissed; a swelling cacophony of misery was the zoo that night, with all the creatures in their own ways uttering the same frantic plea, ‘Let us out. Let us out! LET US OUT!’ They would not be calmed. The
noises that night would have frightened the bravest of hardened soldiers; plug up your ears, run away, do not listen to those ugly sounds, for who could bear such unhappiness, it would break your heart. The keepers didn’t know what to do, they could not open the cages and let the animals out, to shriek and charge down our city streets, so instead they fetched their rifles and loaded some with tranquilliser darts and some with real bullets. They put a lion to sleep, and a polar bear and a hysterical penguin, and they shot and killed one tiger who was scratching his mate apart.
And that will have to do for plasticine building for ever because, oh God, hold tight, here goes.
13TREASURES OF ENTRALLA. THE ENTRALLA BUN. Moulded to roughly resemble the shape of our most celebrated monument—the Lubatkin Tower (though I have seen some closer to the Eiffel Tower of Paris or the Pyramids of Giza or the Minaret of the Mosque of Samara)—the Entralla bun is a mound of baked dough, the crust of which is generally slightly burnt, coated in melted sugar. As a young boy, so our folk tale runs, when our city was little more than a collection of wooden huts, Lubatkin, aiding his mother in baking bread, dozed in front of the clay oven and when he finally pulled the bread out it was burnt and had formed an odd shape. That shape was the shape of the future fortress; from that moment on Lubatkin knew his destiny.
THE WORLD LOSES ITS HEAD
The World and Our City
The World, the third planet in outward distance from the Sun, is the only planet in the solar system known to contain conditions capable of sustaining life. The planet orbits the Sun at 29.8 km per second. It rotates completely on its axis once every 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4 seconds. Its lithosphere consists of roughly a dozen large plates and several smaller ones. Whilst moving about these plates can cause the phenomenon known as earthquakes. An earthquake is most obviously recognisable on the World’s surface by a shaking of the ground. The city of Entralla, with the River Nir running through it, has prospered as a trading centre despite experiencing numerous earthquakes. Many historic buildings have survived, representing the Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque and classical styles of architecture. Manufacturing includes agricultural machinery, mining equipment, electronic calculators, clothing and foodstuffs. Population (estimate, before its most recent seismic activity) 475,100.
A BEAUTIFUL SUMMER morning, a few thin clouds in the sky, peaceful, calm, perhaps strangely still. The time was seven thirty-five. Clocks and watches all over the city were quietly and noisily marking time but many of them were about to stop and refuse to start ever again, no matter how carefully their insides were taken out and how lovingly put back together again. Time, a man-made device, was about to suffer a stroke. And time measured now seven forty-five. Nearly there. Hold onto your companions, take hold of something solid, a postbox perhaps, a street lamp, a building, but be warned, trust nothing, everything you had faith in before—put it aside.
It was seven forty-six on 16 July, a Friday morning. The inhabitants of our city were looking forward to the weekend, many were slumbering still and it might well turn out to be a slumber of a permanent nature. Some devout citizens were in the cathedral, the archbishop was reading his morning sermon, they looked a little bored, but they’d soon wake up.
It was seven forty-seven. And now came the quiet knocking, some of the people could hear that knocking, a strange sort of knocking that they had never heard before, it did not mean that there was anyone at the door, nothing so specific, their whole houses were being knocked upon, their whole beings, but so gently to begin with it was barely perceptible.
It was seven forty-seven and twelve seconds. There was no turning back now. Around the world in seismic stations scientists were about to report an earthquake measuring 7.5 on the scale named after the American physicist Charles Francis Richter.
It was seven forty-seven and twenty-nine seconds. After the knocking came a deep throbbing sound. The ground beneath began to rock slightly, first to the north, then to the south. The throbbing became louder. Then stopped. Then started again, deeper now, louder still. Then stopped. Then again, uglier, uglier. Rising, rising in volume until it became an inhuman snarl. Hands on ears. We were vibrating, we were being rocked like babies, except this mother had evil intentions. The earth, the earth was calling out, it was furious, it was screaming, it was in agony.
Everyone’s china was tumbling into a thousand pieces, everyone’s body was being jangled. Something was jangling all of us, shaking us violently, moving our bodies roughly into positions they had never known before. We couldn’t stop it. Try as we might, we couldn’t stop it. It had complete hold of us, we were its plaything. This was it, we all thought, this was the end, we were going to die.
And still we were dancing this unhappy dance, whilst about us the music of this dance, this monstrous snarl was rising. One continuous ugly noise. All over the city, everyone and everything joining in. It mattered little if people danced, people were always dancing but what if buildings danced, imagine that, and what if a whole city began to dance, imagine that. And the snarl reached its ghastly climax. And then? Silence.
That was how it felt. But how did it look? On St Lekk’s Hill, overlooking Entralla, one man reported that he could actually see the city sway like a field of corn in the wind. But buildings don’t sway, buildings are supposed to keep still, that’s what we like about them. Buildings don’t like to sway, it upsets them, they go on strike, they revolt, they give up. From his advantageous position the witness saw that the buildings were indeed beginning to give up, but he saw it only for a second because then a vast cloud of dust began to rise and with it the witness immediately lost his usefulness.
In the city that fateful morning it was no benign cloud that had risen but a hurricane of stone dust which howled about the toppling streets, it blocked out the sun, turned our city to night, darker, darker than any night, it shrieked in and out of the broken windows of the thousands of now disintegrating rooms, it blew people against walls and out of buildings, it was a shriek and a howl in direct competition with the snarl of the earth, and within it, like the sounding of a triangle barely heard in a swelling concert, glass cracked, steel snapped, whole buildings groaned, but there was not a single human sound. Not yet.
The city, too excited by this metamorphosis, began to get carried away, in the epicentre of the quake, reckoned to have been on People Street, it behaved with particular cruelty towards its structures. The whole street was lacerated, its buildings flung this way and that, pavements rose four metres, houses sunk until they could no longer be seen, gas pipes were ripped open, electricity lines torn away from their poles and in desperate spasms flung themselves everywhere, whipping the shattered street and its shattered buildings, starting fires. Now in fear the bells of all our churches began to toll, clanged by some unseen, petrified hand, as if our city was opening its throat and calling out for help.
So many people of Entralla that morning felt the earth give way beneath them, or saw through rhombus windows, in the dimness, that the houses across the way were being played with as if they were paper places. They were being torn into little balls and hurled along streets for kilometres and finally deposited, as if suddenly the game had been abandoned, at an entirely different address.
The world, the whole world, the people of Entralla would have you believe, and they were convincing enough, was at an end. And who could doubt them, for just then in our old school on Littsen Street the geography classroom on the second floor tumbled to the ground, shattering in the playground, and for a moment the sky was filled with pages of textbooks and children’s essays, from the excellent to the appalling, peacefully floating downwards, essays on every country in the world. And the several globes of that classroom broke free from their stands and began to roll hurriedly down Littsen Street, free at last, until they finally stopped at the bottom of the street, no longer legible and misshapen now with dents and with an ashy grey colour covering them as if the earth had become the moon.
Tall buildings could be seen fainting
onto smaller buildings who could not or would not carry their weight. A grandmother on the ground floor of a house on Wilm Lintel Road saw her two grandchildren, one a boy, one a girl, smile at her in a strange way quite out of keeping with their age, and then an instant later, after her home had let out a single brief cry, and once the dust had cleared, she saw that her grandchildren had been replaced with her entire bathroom and that her bath tub and basin had taken their places.
On Trinity Square, on the outskirts of Entralla, tall residential blocks, each fifteen storeys tall, collapsed into massive corpses, into piles of rubble of inconceivable largeness. People’s homes concertina-ed from fifteen floors into seven or even five. One block at the eastern end of the square was cut in half, so that half lay in jagged heaps on the square floor, while the other half remained standing. This bisected residence was reminiscent of dolls’ houses that open down the centre, revealing the rooms and their contents in two equal halves. In that remaining portion of a block, half a bedroom could be seen with half a bed, half a bathroom with a bath but no lavatory, half a sitting room with shelves and a television but no chairs to sit and watch it with, half kitchens with cookers but no refrigerators. Half apartments stretching all fifteen stories upwards, with only half families left inside them. Lovers had held hands as they lay asleep in their bed, the female on the left, the male on the right, but when the female awoke her hand was empty. If she moved over in her half-wakefulness hoping to find his warm body she too would have tumbled all the way down onto the broken floor of Trinity Square.
In Cathedral Square, on that particular morning the cathedral bell tower was ringing its bells excitedly as the cathedral began swaying dangerously from left to right and the great roof began to collapse. Earthquakes are unfathomable things, they will obliterate one building, yet leave its neighbour a little dizzy but otherwise unscathed. Above the cathedral, on top of Prospect Hill, Lubatkin’s Tower, seemingly indestructible, stood firm, for some keeping hope alive; for as long as the tower still stands, so long do we have a city called Entralla. And as the cathedral at the foot of Prospect Hill lost interest in all the statues in its niches and let them shatter in the square, as its pinnacles snapped in two, as it spat its masonry ornamentation away, as portions of its roof tumbled down slapping the floor of the nave, Lubatkin’s Tower was kept company by the bell tower which only wobbled a little, in sympathy perhaps. Within the cathedral itself the appalled archbishop looked out from his pulpit from which only moments before he had been delivering his sermon; as the dust cleared a little he saw rubble in front of him and a few dishevelled and dusty parishioners, rag dolls dispersed about his church.
