Alva and Irva (23 page)

N
OW FROM
our doorstep vantage point we saw someone we instantly recognised: Jonas Lutt. The presence of Jonas Lutt was yet another reminder that earthquakes certainly do not only concern sculptors and mayors, collapsing apartment blocks and female twins, sometimes they are even about our street, and sometimes they are even about long-distance lorry drivers.

Irva looked at me briefly in terror and rushed back inside our dying home.

J
ONAS
L
UTT,
in 12 Veber Street, alone in his bedroom—which our own mother had recently quietly tip-toed away from that morning to journey to her work at the Central Post Office—had been woken by the earthquake. His initial earthquake experience was not one of horror but of mild amusement. He was woken by a terrific banging. As he opened his eyes, he saw that somehow his chest of drawers was alive. Jonas watched it as the quake bounced him up and down naked upon his bed. The chest of drawers, which was a Lutt family heirloom and was an expensive piece of genuine Rococo furniture, originating in France, and built in the year 1720 (approximately), moved around the bedroom, turning on itself, spinning on a single corner, bowing to Jonas, its drawers moving in and out as if some invisible force were desperately searching for a piece of its
clothing, slamming the drawers shut, and then pulling them open again. Just as the thing decided to march straight towards him, the rumbling halted and, as if suddenly shocked, it collapsed, falling with a crash onto its back, its little legs quite still again.
¹⁴

As Jonas leapt out of bed he noticed that great gashes had appeared on his bedroom walls and as he stood at his window he heard the crashing begin all about the city. And then in a panic he remembered our mother and called out our mother’s name, ‘Dallia, Dallia!’

And I watched him that morning, briefly, from our doorstep, charge up the place that used to be called Veber Street, and then I looked away and hurried inside our home after Irva.

O
UR HOME
mumbled and whined but still, for the moment, kept upright. Irva was inside, in the listing attic, by the city, returning the buildings to their correct places, trying to make everything right again.

The city of Entralla was missing a few of its key monuments, and certainly in many places it had been jumbled about, but it was mostly still there, still noticeably its triumphant self, still an undoubted miracle: our plasticine city. And Irva would not leave it. She turned her back to me and continued her work. No. 27 Veber
Street muttered and sang to her, as it foundered. She wouldn’t come out, we’d made a promise she kept repeating, she couldn’t leave the city, who’d look after it if she didn’t. I tried to force her out, but she kicked now and bit and wouldn’t be persuaded. I explained the terrible danger, but all she would consider was her plasticine city, which she could not, she implored, could not abandon.

I ran back out into Veber Street, I begged our neighbours to help, to drag my sister from our home, but they looked away. ‘She’s all right,’ they said, they had seen her just a moment ago. They were more concerned with people they hadn’t seen since the night before. ‘Don’t bother us now.’

What could I do? I looked around, asked more people for help, I begged them, but they ignored me, or pushed me away. I saw people carrying their expensive objects out into the street, I saw an old woman heaving a grandfather clock as if it were her fainted husband, tall and stiff. And suddenly, in that moment, I realised that there was only one way that I could bring Irva out, one certain way.

I went back inside. I took hold of one of the boxes, I brought it out. I took hold of a second, a third, a fourth. Irva called out, ‘What are you doing? Where are you taking them? Bring them back!’ Slowly, box by box, each box containing its plasticine jewels, I brought Entralla out onto the street and carefully stacked it as I heard our house chatting away to itself, sometimes gently, sometimes not.

After a while, panicking, as I moved now with five or six boxes at a time, she tried to work out where there were more boxes, in the house or in the street—her loyalty divided now, her love challenged. She was being forced to abandon at least a part of the city, she was being ripped in half. And she never once dared to take a box from me. I had it in my hands, she was too terrified for the contents, she loved them too much. Where should she go, in or out? Out or in, Irva, which is it to be? ‘Please, please stop, I beg you!’ But out it went box by box.

Barely half an hour after the earthquake had struck I set about saving the city.

I
T TOOK
J
ONAS
L
UTT
nearly three hours to reach Napoleon Street, the roads had become so confused and misleading and sometimes had completely disappeared. He ignored all the calls for help he heard on his way, he was too busy, he hadn’t time to stop, and to those in distress he answered cordially: ‘I’m sorry, I’m in a rush, later maybe, not now, sorry, sorry.’ Outside the Paulus Hotel on the Paulus Boulevard he saw guests dressed in every conceivable fashion of nightwear, such colourful displays of candy stripes and paisley patterns, floral designs and silk slips, quite unsuitable for the occasion. And as those guests swapped their stories, they looked across to the other side of the street and became suddenly quiet. Half of the Paulus Boulevard had been reduced to steaming rubble. But on Jonas marched and as he marched onwards he passed many other people travelling in the opposite direction surely on hurried missions not dissimilar to his own on this day of a thousand, thousand tragedies. He felt that he might be too late, he felt that something terrible had happened, he thought that he might have lost her, but he prayed he was wrong. Let her be all right, he prayed, let her be all right, God in Heaven let her be all right. But God in his heaven had other things on his mind, as Jonas Lutt finally turned into Napoleon Street.

T
HERE WERE
nearly eight hundred individual boxes in Veber Street, all neatly stacked up, all calm and saved. And then in I went again. Careful, careful. She was sitting on the attic floor, holding onto one of the table legs. Shivering and speechless. I took up the chipboard squares that supported Prospect Hill, I pulled Prospect Hill from the table, Lubatkin’s Tower shaking slightly. Irva looked at me, exhausted, defeated. She let go of the table then, she followed me, a few steps behind, out of the house into Veber Street. And there she stood, in the street. Finally. Irva. Outside.

I gave her Prospect Hill. She nodded. She held onto it. And she waited there in the street for me with the hill and the fortress in her hands, calmer now, with the boxed city all about her. As I went back inside to rescue Central Entralla.

W
HEN
J
ONAS
L
UTT
reached Napoleon Street, stumbling and slipping over high rubble, he could not at first, because of the smoke, work out which building was the Central Post Office. He wondered if perhaps he had arrived at the wrong street, surely he had. But then he saw the symbol of the post horn above the portico and beneath it the flames. He was calm then, he was calm when he climbed up the scorching entrance steps. He was calm even when he began to shove his great weight against the locked entrance doors. He took hold of the door handles which burnt his hands. When he kicked and shrieked at the stubborn doors, he was no longer calm, not any more. And he began to wail then, he began to curse that thoughtless God in his heaven and to repudiate him with ever more savage and appropriate sentences. And then he was pulled and tugged away from the entrance by policemen, choking in the cruel heat.

And then he just stood. He stood still from a distance. Just watching, looking at the burning post office. Expressionless.

O
N
I
TOILED,
chipboard square after chipboard square, placing them gently into Irva’s waiting hands as soon as I was out in the street again. And with each new square appearing Irva began to smile more and more. And the smile grew into a quiet laugh and the laugh grew into a giggling. And now each time I arrived with a new square there was Irva, giggling away, delighted at each new saved fraction of her city. And I too began laughing with her, together we, in hysterics now, were unable to stop ourselves from cackling in our plasticine triumph, as more and more of the city was safe.

Irva placed each part of the rescued centre of our city on the top of boxes until the trestle tables were free to be moved. The legs of the tables were easy, but the table surfaces had to be slid down the stairs and splinters cut into my fingers. But still I laughed, we laughed, we couldn’t stop ourselves.

Once the tables were erected again, Irva began to put the puzzle of Entralla together.

J
ONAS
L
UTT
WOULD
stop that afternoon and help anyone who asked for it, he even attended to those who did not call for him or
even perhaps did not really require his attentions. He made himself useful, pulling away small boulders of masonry, alerting other men to places his strength could not reach alone. He attempted to comfort the tearful, he thought about nothing other than those poor scarecrow people around him. He gave a little boy his jacket and would perhaps have undressed himself entirely if that would have been of use. He helped other men tugging out the heavy, swollen corpse of a fat man who had died crushed in his bath. He saw a man dancing a waltz with the body of his dead daughter, calling out, ‘I’ve found my daughter! I’ve found my daughter!’ He saw rubble both sides of a street, no houses left at all, and in between a stilled and lonely trolley bus.

And it was only later, when he saw an elderly couple holding tight to each other that he began to shake. Delayed reaction, that’s what it was. And it was only then that he remembered what he had seen when the flames of the Central Post Office had finally been extinguished.

W
E SPENT THE
entire day, quietly working on, our joyful cackling ignited again by the slightest thing, recovering the city of Entralla from its trauma. About us people made such noise it started our hands shaking, and we had to keep our hands steady then, it was most important. And then finally with the buildings back in the correct places, we allowed ourselves a little rest, while back inside our home Mother’s room had slouched into the kitchen, and the whole house was lifting slowly up from the street, threatening to fall backwards. We’d have to jump up a little to reach our entrance step. But we didn’t care then, not then, by then it was finished: a whole city in a street. How we laughed.

J
ONAS
L
UTT, SEEING
that elderly couple holding fast to each other, suddenly remembered that he had been one of the first to enter the Central Post Office on Napoleon Street. And suddenly he was able to remember quite clearly what it was that he had seen. Postman Kurt Laudus, who had once been a possible marriage candidate
for Mother, who was a friend of mine from Café Louis, was buried under a fraction of the ceiling, but some of him was still visible, his face, for example, which was already bruised, even before the earthquake had happened, smashed by Louis in a jealous fit. Aged Grandfather, the postmaster, lay still and rigid in his office, with a strange grimace on his face, with his mouth open, with his clenched teeth showing, in an expression that would have suited an animal better than a human. And then Jonas saw, on the floor, burnt post office workers. From one of the steaming pockets a gloved fireman was able to pull out a post office personnel card which said on it, ‘Marta Rena Stroud’. On the face of another body a small patch of unburned skin remained on which could be seen a roughly circular patch of black dirt, but perhaps it was not dirt but a rude fly perched there, but looking closely Jonas Lutt was able to see that that was not a patch of dirt or a fly at all, but actually a mole, which somehow curiously resembled the shape of a city far away in the Netherlands, a mole just like the one our mother had on her cheek, coincidentally in exactly the same place too. That was what Jonas Lutt remembered as he saw that old couple holding each other in front of him. He shook then with all his nerves as if an aftershock was being experienced in his person alone. He shook and trembled and quivered and could not steady himself. He would shake like this for three days and nights. He could not stop it. Some kind man gave him a bottle of brandy but as he brought it to his lips he was unable to stop himself from shaking it all over the street. Some kind woman tried to hug him but then she began to shake also and had to let go. He shook himself then in small, shaking, mechanical steps all the way to Veber Street. On his way, oblivious, he passed signs saying ‘Do not enter this street—epidemic threatened,’ or, ‘Ottila’s hospital now re-opened,’ or ‘Looters will be shot’, but on Jonas shook, onwards to Veber Street.