Alva and Irva (27 page)

And they were probably right. It was probably time for the city to die. Jonas said we must forget it, that it had made us ill and that, until we’d forgotten it, we would not recover. Irva and I moved back into Grandfather’s house in Pult Street. Irva didn’t say very much. After we’d been there a few days she never mentioned the city again.

A
BOUT THE ACTUAL
city, they fixed the Central Post Office. They put Corinthian pillars at the front, taken from another building that had been more completely ruined, they put metal counters inside. It barely resembled our old post office at all, but at least the old steps were still there. What a confusion the postal service was in in those days. Which address exists, which doesn’t? Postmen, people who before had known their individual parts of the city so well, would come back asking where such and such a street was, they
couldn’t find it anywhere. A new postmaster came from a nearby town. He was a man who had no understanding or love for Entralla, to him it was always the mound of rubble the earthquake had made of it.

I was frequently confused about the city. I’d stop still in the street sometimes, just stalled there, looking about, not really knowing where I was going. Nobody recognised me as I wandered Entralla, I would have to have been with Irva to be recognised. There is nothing particularly exceptional about a twin alone without her sister, even if she does have a North sign upon her forehead, or a map hidden beneath her clothes.

So we just stayed in Grandfather’s house mostly. Jonas did try to get us to come with him and he did look after us well, and occasionally set Irva talking again, but we couldn’t find the energy to go anywhere anymore, nor barely to look out of the window, not when everything out there was such a mess, not when we recognised so little of it, not when it made no sense. Endless days, surviving on Grandfather’s money and Jonas’s rent, days without purpose. And always we felt so tired.

We would never have survived without Jonas. He was always there, holding our hands, brushing our hair, cleaning up after us. He even bought plasticine for Irva when she asked for it again.

I returned to my old vague dreams of travelling and began to spend hours in Grandfather’s bathroom flopped naked in front of the mirror. I talked again of other countries and other faraway customs. Sometimes Irva would let me walk her up and down the street, once Jonas even carried her piggyback all the way up Prospect Hill, from the fortress she looked out but she didn’t seem to see anything.

And then she started building miniature 27 Veber Streets.

27 V
EBER
S
TREETS.
One after the other. When we told her it was time to eat she’d shuffle into the kitchen, shovel the meal down her, mutter, ‘Thank you’, and as quickly as she could, shuffle out again. I saw her on so many occasions staring so seriously at those models of 27 Veber Street, as if she were wondering how to get inside.
Jonas and I took her to Veber Street once, wondering if that would help. I do not know whether it was because our home was boarded up or because of the ‘DANGER’ signs written about it, but for whatever reason Irva didn’t seem to recognise our old home at all. And she carried on, day after day, building more and more 27 Veber Streets. She even started to place them together, she made streets of them and then, one day, she embarked on her final city of plasticine.

ON THE USEFULNESS OF PLASTICINE BUILDINGS 3: SEARCHING. Even now I cannot regard the third and final exhibit in Gallery 24 without upset, for it is upsetting let there be no doubt about that. It is a city that can only conjure negative feelings. It is an evil, mean, limited place. If this city were to have inhabitants, they would surely one and all be shifty, suspicious people filled with disquiet and malevolence. They would range from petty thieves to habitual murderers. If there were any children there, they would be secretive and awkward, they would have imaginary friends who would constantly get the better of them. It is a city composed of hurt and self-neglect. On a first sighting you may assume that I am a man subject to gross exaggerations, for it will likely seem to you that there is nothing particularly upsetting about this model. It is set out, plausibly enough, like many another city; it has patterns of streets, squares, boulevards and parks—it is in fact based upon the city of Entralla. But as your studying becomes more thorough, you will see that this entire city consists only of one building, endlessly repeated. On this city’s version of Cathedral Square there is no cathedral, but only, once again, that same house, always the same size no matter what building it has usurped, and in the place of the bell tower and baptistery again you see that same house. On the top of this city’s Prospect Hill there is no Lubatkin’s Tower but only that same house. That same house in every road, street, square. You may initially have thought this was a curious city, amusing possibly, but you’ll soon find the repetition makes you nervous, you demand that something be different, but it never is, you see, not there. It is
that same note played over and over again, the same note as you look through those streets rising in volume, until it fails to amuse you, it nauseates you, it disgusts you. In an effort to make your thoughts consider something new, you perhaps begin to wonder why this city was built, you begin to think of the person who built it. You see her now, all alone, day after day, constructing the same house over and over again. How long, you wonder now, did it take to construct? Eight months. Eight whole months with nothing but that same house day after day, week after week, month after month. Her dreams, you suppose, and you suppose correctly, must have been visited by that same house, by multitudes, armies, empires of that same house, with nothing to disturb it, to break the distressing monotony of that awful sameness, because as she runs in her nightdress in her nightmares down ill lit streets, she would come across in her horrifying trauma a vast and endless maze consisting solely of that same house.

A
FTER THERE
were hundreds of 27 Veber Streets (each less accurate than the first) to be found all over the house; after she’d completed her mock-city; after we couldn’t move for 27 Veber Streets, a new and final stage came over Irva. She started building tiny cubes, endless lines of cubes perfectly formed, all the same size.

‘What is it, Irva? What are you trying to tell us?’ But by then she had stopped speaking. She just pointed to those cubes, or would earnestly hold them up to us. Later she’d come in to see Jonas or me in our separate rooms, or together in his, and would give us a cube, ‘Thank you, Irva,’ we’d always say, ‘thank you very much.’ She’d smile, kiss us both, and leave the room. When those cubes had grown dust Irva would take them away again, she’d crush them and replace them with new ones. And it was only later, much later, that I understood that Irva’s cubes represented a single room. She was building again and again a single solitary room. This woman who built cities, this woman who it seemed to me could construct whole worlds, this woman had now reduced herself to a single, tiny, cube-shaped chamber.

And then she stopped building altogether.

And then she sat still all day, quite useless, and wouldn’t be encouraged.

‘Hello, Irva, come back wherever you are.’

T
HE DOCTORS
visited her, they said ‘nervous exhaustion’ and gave her some pills. The pills seemed to make no difference, she still sat there, looking but not seeing. I built again for her, I built miniature cathedrals and opera houses, I built fortresses and post offices, I built homes. She held them in her hands a while until her wrists became tired and they fell to the floor. She was lost inside herself, and I couldn’t get her out. I showed her photographs, a copy of Mother’s book on baby care, Grandfather’s matchstick models, I showed her my map, I placed her hands upon my map but they only slipped off again. ‘Come back, Irva, come back, please. Where’ve you gone? Where is it that you are now?’

I dressed her everyday, I heaved her with Jonas’s help into a wheelchair and walked her about the recovering city, sometimes people stared at us. She slept on our walks mostly. I’d take her into Café Louis, repaired now, I’d get an Entralla bun and mix it in a bowl with a little milk, and spoon it into her. It seemed to me that she smiled sometimes. Was she finding a way out, was she trying to get back? I washed her body, her frail, lonely body, my sister body, but I am not certain that she ever knew that it was me that was touching it. ‘Irva, hello. Hello, Irva.’ Or, as if she were a child, ‘How’s Irva today?’ ‘Where’s Irva today?’ But she had gone.

All along she had never really wanted to come out, she’d peeped out for a while, it’s true, but in the end, she’d gone back inside. Deep within. She’s probably happiest there.

I go looking for her sometimes. And sometimes I think these little sentences: The world is on my skin. The world was once swallowed by my sister. There are stars on the ceiling of our train station. Outside the train station, up in the night, are the actual stars. We kept a city with us in our old house. Us, in the world, Irva and me, standing on a sphere.

I’
M GOING
on a journey. I’ve been sitting here in Grandfather’s house in Pult Street, writing this history of my sister and me, so I can get it out. So it can be left behind, for I shan’t be taking it, or her, with me. I’m unburdening myself. I’m shedding history. But it must be kept, for it is a history of Entralla, just like that of Grand Duke Lubatkin, however humble. Or perhaps it is only the history of a street, or even only of a single house in that street. Or perhaps it
is
the history of a city, only of a city made of plasticine. And perhaps, like all those other faded cities, like Knossos or Persepolis or Timgad, it’s right that, even though the city has fallen into ruin, still some history of it remains.

Sometimes, when I climb stairs, it takes me a while to get my breath back. I know why it is, it’s because I’m tired. Whilst I write this history, I have to keep taking breaks. I haven’t been well. I need a change. I shall be leaving soon, and most likely I shan’t be coming back. I want to be somewhere else, I want to be anywhere, anywhere that is not 42 Pult Street, anywhere that is not Entralla. I want to see streets I don’t recognise. I want to see people I’ve never seen before. I want everything to be new. I hate anything familiar, I hate what I see everyday through these eyes. I loathe it, anywhere else is wonderful to me, no matter how soiled, simply because it is not here. That’s all I crave: somewhere that is not here. If only to glimpse it so briefly, if only between blinks. That would do.

T
he new statue for our city is of twin sisters. At their feet is a model in miniature of the central portion of our city. The sculptor has caught them, he has re-created Alva and Irva (if perhaps a little idealised). Quick, I told him, when at last he had finished his work, quick, cast them in bronze, the clay’s too vulnerable, someone might knock them over, someone might feel the urge to press their fingers deep into their clay flesh. And now they will last.

I returned to Entralla some twelve years ago, to a very different Entralla than I had known in my youth. At times I was hard-pressed to recognise it at all. Fortunately the old tower remains; some things, after all, do not change. But all the same this was home, I had come home. If indeed there was a home anywhere for me now.

In Canada, years ago, I had rowed and lost touch with my brother. I was amazed how little time it can take to lose a family. For a long while I never thought of home, sometimes though I’d catch myself wondering about Alva, about whether she thought of me, about whether she was perhaps still waiting for me, spending lonely afternoons looking at the ceiling of Entralla’s Central Train Station. Then, after years of ignoring my past, more and more often, for no particular reason and quite involuntarily, I took to sitting on my own in cafés mumbling to myself, trying to recall my own language. But so much I had forgotten. I began to write endless little notes of only a few sentences, of instances of my childhood that I was able still to recall, and once I had a few of those memories on paper many more came rushing back to me, and with those memories how I felt I had rediscovered my home, I could feel it again. And with each memory returned I felt more myself. I spent more
and more time alone, remembering. In the end it seemed increasingly obvious to me that I must in fact return home. I told people at work that I’d be gone a week, ten days perhaps, that was twelve years ago.