Alva and Irva (21 page)

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.

The World and Our City

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.

Constantin Brack, our celebrated sculptor, in his studio on Jay Street, just beginning his work, saw various full-length marble people dancing across the floor towards him, never changing their expressions once. He opened his arms to receive them and they crowded in and crushed him to death.

Our mayor at that time, Rinas Holt, sitting at his breakfast table in the mayor’s residence, saw the heavy metal crest of our country lift up from the wall and strike him rudely on the head, spilling his brains into his bowl of cornflakes and turning the milk pink. What a time to lose a mayor, who would look after us now, now that we needed looking after more than ever? Ambras Cetts. Ambras Cetts was the man. Ambras Cetts had been spending the many years of our plasticine building climbing up the political ladder until, as the earthquake struck, he was assistant to the mayor of Entralla. Ambras Cetts, yes, he was the man for the job.