Alva and Irva (10 page)

ON THE USEFULNESS OF PLASTICINE BUILDINGS 2: HOW TO COME FIRST IN SCHOOL. The second exhibit to be found in Gallery 24 of the Entralla Art Museum is a large model constructed of red plasticine of a historic walled city, within which, on the summit of a hill, are the remains of a fortress. For their entry the twins had created a plasticine model of the architecture of our city built in the time of Grand Duke Lubatkin. But they had not depicted the city as it would have looked through Lubatkin’s eyes, rather they had built it as it would be seen in the present were all the buildings erected since Lubatkin’s time removed. The fortress in their model, for example, is exactly how the fortress appears today. But the old wall which used to surround the fortress was no longer clearly visible and only traces of it remain. Occasionally a clump of ancient bricks is seen connected to a more modern building, or more rarely a trench where a part of the wall had been removed. The twins revealed where in the city pieces of the wall are still present and from that were able to show how our city had grown in size since the time of Lubatkin’s parental care. During all the research for this model not a single book had been consulted. The twins achieved their knowledge by walking around the old town, carefully observing. All the evidence was there to be found, they simply spent the time to discover it.

This model is certainly in the poorest condition of all the exhibits in Gallery 24. Dust so thick it resembles mould particularly
distorts the sad fortress. But worst of all is the length of wall at the southern end of this predominantly empty city. This approximately fifty-centimetre-long imitation of ancient masonry has been flattened out of all shape. If it were possible with minuscule tweezers to remove all hairs and skins of dust, an identifiable print of a child’s rather podgy elbow would be found. But the owner of the elbow, a boy called Piter Soffit, was not to blame. He was pushed as the children crowded around the plasticine skeleton of this ancient city. The appearance of Piter Soffit’s elbow robbed the city of its beauty and proved in a swift and clumsy moment its heartbreaking fragility. And how cruel it was that its destruction did not make that shattering sound which so alarmingly and worthily brings us to the attention of broken china or glass, how cruel it was that it could be demolished into an illegible lump without so much as a sigh. The teachers were unable to see amongst that scrum of young students who had pushed the boy, though they suspected that it might have been someone called Kersty Plint. Several pupils insisted that in fact it was not Kersty Plint but a boy called Girin Lang, a rumour which the twins never believed.

A
FTER THE SCHOOL
project a photograph was taken of us standing before our successful model and later that photograph together with one of the whole school and various essays and drawings by other of our fellow schoolmates were put into a metal tube which was sealed at both ends and buried deep in the school grounds. A time capsule. So that other generations of Entrallans, long after our deaths may learn what it was like to be us. Our plasticine victory was safe for centuries to come.

Station Hall

T
HE QUIET BOY,
Girin Lang, who we knew secretly wanted to be with us, continued to avoid us all the time, despite our winning the first place in school. He very rarely came out into the playground any more and if he did he would always go up to some other children and speak to them, forcing himself upon their company. I didn’t mind, I could wait. The city of Alvairvalla is a city of plasticine and of patience.

We continued to follow him to Verres Square. Mother would inevitably be waiting for us at the school gates but we’d walk past her: ‘We’re not coming home, mother, not yet.’ We’d follow the Quiet Boy all the way to his house on Verres Square, and once we reached Verres Square, and he’d darted inside his house again, we’d often sit on benches in the square just looking at his house, for hours sometimes, just looking. Occasionally we’d see his little white face peeking through the net curtains on the ground floor, checking to see if we, his friends, were still there. When we saw his little face staring at us, we’d stare back at him, our hearts beating faster and faster, and we’d keep staring at him until his face disappeared behind the curtains again. He was always the first one to stop staring. But after a month or so of this following, while we were sitting in Verres Square, the door of no. 12 opened and there stood a thin woman with a cigarette, who was the Quiet Boy’s mother, Mrs Lang, looking directly at us and at no one else. She even walked up to us, she told us to clear off, to leave her son, our friend, alone, to stop terrorising him. Obviously, we said to each other, shaking with nerves, as we returned home, obviously she hadn’t understood. We weren’t terrorising the Quiet Boy. Hardly that.

The day after we were ushered into the headmaster’s office. Grandfather was in the office and so was Mother and so was Mrs Lang, but not the Quiet Boy himself, who she referred to throughout the meeting as ‘My Girin’ or ‘My Little Girin’ or ‘My Darling Little Girin’. We were told that we were forbidden to follow the
Quiet Boy any more, that we had upset him, that we were giving him nightmares, that he would wake up in the night screaming, all because of us. We terrified him, his mother said, we had seen that he was shy and timid and because of this we had gone after him and would never leave him alone. Something had to be done about it.

Mrs Lang said to Mother: ‘Your daughters walked straight out of a picture book that frightens children. They should’ve stayed in that picture book, you should have left them there.’ The headmaster told Mrs Lang to calm down, and then with utter strictness he said to us: ‘This following/bullying can not continue.’

We were forbidden to go near him ever again; if we were caught following him there’d be great trouble. Verres Square and the Quiet Boy: out of bounds. We must keep our distance at all times. After we left the headmaster’s office we had identically red and throbbing right hands from ten strikes each by the headmaster’s ruler, which stopped us, for a day, from working with plasticine.

Irva insisted that Alvairvalla didn’t need company after all and for a while I agreed with her. We returned to our city and allowed it to grow a little more, adding extra streets for ourselves alone. And it was at this time, as we progressed with our labours, that we discovered it was best, after we had roughly moulded the plasticine into its required proportions, never to touch it with fingers again because fingers always left a mark. And so our plasticine models began to improve as we moved them and shaped them with special plastic and wooden knives which Mr Misons sold in his shop—though these plastic and wooden tools were supposed to be used with clay and not with plasticine.

In any case, very soon people would have more pressing things than us to worry over, very soon our pursuing the Quiet Boy would be forgotten. People’s thoughts everywhere would stretch and expand until they were concerned more with planets than with people.

T
HERE ARE MANY
people on this earth who believe the earth to be solid, who trust the surface that they step upon every day and trust it so implicitly that they scarcely even think of it. Terra firma they call it. But the earth is not to be trusted. There is a mighty
subterranean engine beneath us and sometimes that engine vibrates and in those vibrations can be heard a roar, a roar of something that will dismiss any faith in that ground beneath our feet. Cracks open and from somewhere down below terror pours out.

In 1742 in Lisbon, the capital of Portugal, an earthquake demolished so much of the beautiful city that town planners considered moving the capital’s site completely. In 1976 in Tangshan, People’s Republic of China, it is estimated that 350,000 people were killed by an earthquake. On 7 December 1988, 25,000 people were crushed to death in an earthquake in Spitak, Armenia, most of them trapped in public buildings, apartment blocks and schools. Schools.

How we pitied the poor schoolchildren of Spitak, as we sat in our own classroom, together at our shared desk, earnestly regarding the walls and ceiling, trying to seek out cracks. The science master, Mr Irt, the whole of the class, the whole of the city even, were speaking of earthquakes again. There had been a tremor on the earth’s surface. Buildings had shaken, a few brick chimneys had collapsed, a few ornaments had jumped down from their shelves to their deaths, but that was all. No serious damage had been caused, and mercifully no one had died. But the aftershocks inside the minds of the people of our city would far outlast the gentle rumbling of that innocent tremor. The younger schoolchildren on Littsen Street, too young perhaps to realise the seriousness of this event, began to scream in the playground, ‘An earthquake! An earthquake!,’ and even, ‘Let’s have another,’ and then, jumping up and down on the tarmac, they yelled out, ‘Come on earth, quake!’

Mr Irt informed our class that seismologists from America had measured the earth tremor. They reported that it was only a minor tremor, that there was still a good deal of stored energy along the fault line on which our city was built. This meant that further earthquakes of a much more serious nature should be expected. When? They could not say. They could guess where and even how violently but not (such is the current failure of the science of seismology) when.

He told us that there was perhaps another way of knowing when an earthquake was about to occur. This method did not involve
expensive scientific machinery, this method in fact required only that a person use his eyes. What must he look for? Creatures behaving strangely, fish leaping out of the water, fowls beginning to roost in trees, horses refusing to enter their stables, cats arching their backs and screaming for no obvious reason, dogs beginning to bark and wail though there is no one at the door. Bats, Mr Irt told us, were the most sensitive of all—they began to panic days before the actual quake. Dogs were perhaps the least sensitive, they didn’t sense the danger until a few hours before. Humans didn’t sense it until it was upon them. He made it clear to our class that the earthquake itself was rarely the direct cause of deaths, but rather it was broken bridges, falling masonry, collapsed buildings, flying glass from broken windows, upturned furniture in houses and offices, fires from broken chimneys or gas leaks, fallen power lines and, most perturbing of all, human panic that did the killing.

T
HREE DAYS
after the quake Mr Irt took us all on a school outing. Out of Entralla, actually beyond the city, further than we had ever gone before. He didn’t tell us where we were going at first, only that he would show us what damage an earthquake could do. We travelled in the school bus along ever smaller roads, Irva becoming increasingly anxious, feeling homesick, wondering already if we would ever actually see Entralla again. But I felt a joy inside me, as if I could feel myself growing with every moment that we travelled further, I was stretching out over the curved vastness of the globe. ‘So much to see,’ I said to Irva, ‘Open your eyes, look out of the window, look at that! Look at that!’ But Irva kept her eyes tight shut. ‘How far are we going?,’ she kept asking, ‘How far, Alva, how much further?’ And then quieter, ‘I don’t feel safe, I feel like I’m going to fall any moment, I feel sick.’ She was sick when she got off the bus, and I practically had to push her through the door, she didn’t want to get off, as if that bus was the only proof that she would be returning home, as if it were the only proof that the city of Entralla still existed. ‘I want to go home,’ she said, ‘I want to go home.’ ‘Come on, Irva,’ I said, ‘keep up.’ Keep up, I told her, but she couldn’t keep up, she never could. Even in those days when she
tried, she was always a little way behind, but not out of sight, not yet. Yes, it was certainly this school trip that started the tearing between Irva and me.