Alva and Irva (25 page)

The secret behind the success of this gastronomic palace is to be found in its French chef, Monsieur Daniel Arlin; indeed the restaurant serves only French food (which every Frenchman will tell you
is the greatest of all the world’s cuisines). Monsieur Arlin’s mother, the stunningly beautiful Isubel Blukk, however, was an Entrallan, who left our city for a school outing to the capital of France and, having been spotted in a café on the banks of the River Seine, became the lover and then the wife of a Parisian chef and never returned home again. Their son spent much of his childhood in the kitchens of the Ambassadeurs Restaurant, inside the grand Hotel de Crillon on the Place de la Concorde, while Isubel in a fetching uniform changed sheets and dusted rooms. The boy was equally fascinated by his father’s profession and his mother’s stories—stories of her old home so far away—which she used to tell him at night just before he went to sleep. He vowed one day to visit that home, and he was true to his word. The result: the Grand Lubatkin.

Bon appétit.

Pult Street

T
HE FIRE ON
P
EOPLE
S
TREET,
begun by the earthquake, destroyed the entire contents of our Central Library, lost in that tragic blaze were many hundreds of precious books and manuscripts, many irreplaceable items of great civic importance. After the fire was out, after about a week, when the ruins had cooled sufficiently, Ambras Cetts—in his capacity as acting mayor—visited the wretched place. What he saw there resembled the ugly crumbs of some merciless war: there were single walls perversely still standing quite black now with sorrowful holes where windows once were, but nothing of the insides. Mostly there was just black, toxic space, not even metal had survived, it too had melted under the savage heat. The former position of the Central Library was only distinguishable because somehow its marble entrance steps, cracked and blackened, were still there, though now they lead nowhere. If you climbed those fifteen steps they would take you only to a drop of five metres or more. That was all that remained of the library—a great open space, populated only by the ashes and dark fragments of so much defeated knowledge.

Our city had become a gallery of extraordinary sights, it had been singled out as the backdrop to sensational photographs. A few days after the quake whole families, if they were still whole, would set out to peruse the devastation and to have themselves pictured for the sake of future generations in front of this amazingly twisted mass or that dramatically bent street.

The Opera House was perhaps the most popular. The people loved to be photographed standing outside it so that the full extent of the damage could be seen; or inside it just beneath the main rotunda, surrounded by twelve bent Corinthian columns. The earthquake had undressed the Opera House. Gaunt and cold, it stood a shell of a building, lacking bricks and marble.

After the earthquake some loquacious people didn’t talk for weeks, and, conversely, the taciturn suddenly found they could not be quiet. Amongst that latter group was Efrim Alt, the administrator of the Opera House. How he cried when the Opera House shook off its clothes, how he clambered up and down those buckled grand Baroque staircases in distress calculating the damage. He wanted the singers to come, to bring their music. Their music, he would swear to it, would be able to replace the dome, would sweep the carpets, would remove all the dust and debris on the seven hundred and eighty-two seats, would reunite the chandeliers and launch them back up to the ceiling. Perhaps just one aria would do all the work, but the singers never came. Efrim Alt found a kind of solace in the props store: an old-fashioned, wind-up gramophone. He placed the gramophone on the rubble-filled stage and let the sounds of scratched records of Turandot, Tristran and Isolde, Don Giovanni leak out into the empty, roofless vastness.

I
T WAS
F
ATHER
H
OPPIN
who was the first to understand the healing power of plasticine. He had seen all those lonely souls wandering around piles of rubble or staring into empty plots. People did a lot of walking in those weeks after the earthquake, strange nocturnal perambulations into the city’s darkness and into their own. People set out on these walks from their new temporary places of habitation to visit their old homes, they were out on those nights
looking for their pasts. People had died once upon a time in those plots where cranes now loitered. How the priest longed to comfort his shattered people, if only he could find a way.

It began gradually enough. Jonas Lutt, whose house, like ours, was marked for demolition, and who found himself looking for Mother as much as we did, came to live with us in Grandfather’s old home, bringing all his things, his chest of drawers, his photograph albums. Slowly Jonas and I moved the city into the back of his lorry, stacking it up, he tied the trestle tables down, Irva watching us all the while, wincing every now and then, tutting and muttering to herself, naming the streets and squares and how they joined onto one another. He helped Irva up into the lorry, onto the seat next to his, where Mother had once sat; he belted her in, she didn’t complain. He drove so slowly, while all the time Irva watched him with suspicion. The journey took us about seven hours, before the earthquake it would have taken perhaps twenty minutes, and Irva was unable to relax the whole time. All the real houses around her, all the sunken streets we were passing meant nothing to her; to her those places she saw through Jonas’s windscreen were of scant reality. There was only one place for her, only one place to live. It was dark when we reached Pult Street. Jonas suggested we move the city in the morning, Irva wouldn’t hear of it. We all slept the night in the lorry.

As we moved it in the next day, Irva, conducting our work, would demand every now and then that we pass her a certain box. She’d lift the lid to check the contents, she’d sniff at them and smile. She paid no attention to Grandfather’s house, showed no recognition of having been there before. I do not believe she had any comprehension of it at all, she could focus only on plasticine. When Jonas and I had finished moving in the city, she smiled at the great lorry driver and even held his hand. She’d often hold his hand in the future. And so would I.

S
OME PEOPLE
had seen us carefully moving the city in and later they knocked on the door and asked to be shown our plasticine miracle. With Jonas’s encouragement, Irva seemed not to mind, as long as they didn’t come too close, as long as they didn’t get in her way.

Our visitors sat around Central Entralla in Grandfather’s sitting room, quietly involved with the business of grieving. Mostly our visitors just sat mutely, but sometimes they pointed here and there commenting, for example: ‘I remember when People Street looked like that,’ or, ‘Do you know I had completely forgotten that that building used to be on Arsenal Street,’ or, ‘How may years do you think before the Opera House will be reopened?’ Then our neighbours began to come without invitation, bringing drink and food, at all hours of the day and night and they would never be turned away. More and more people came to know of the plasticine city, those residents of Pult Street telling their friends and relatives, and soon the house swelled with callers, with people looking at their lives. They understand them more when they are in miniature.

Calamity can have the consolation of bringing people together. In the past people had kept their happiness and their misery to themselves, but suddenly they found they were eager to share these. It became a custom to light candles around the city, the same candles that are found in our churches, prayer candles, candles for the departed souls of our city. And with these tiny flames lighting up the city at night, the congested house became a little dangerous, and once a woman singed her hair, so we had to begin rationing the visitors, and then queues started to form outside in Pult Street. Soon we were forced to refuse all visitors to the plasticine city. They had got so close, they had leant forward and touched even though I begged them not to (why must people always touch, why is it always such a need with them), they had barged about, and ignored us when we asked for some peace. It was on the day that someone accidentally was jogged and a small part of Liccu Street was dented that Irva, spitting fury, had Jonas Lutt push everyone out. There would be no more visitors, and when people knocked on the front door and shouted at us through the letter box we learnt not to get excited and to wait for the voices and the knocks to go away. But they’d always come back again, after a while, because there was such a passion for plasticine in those days.

And then one morning Father Hoppin came and knocked calmly. ‘I have a suggestion,’ he said, ‘Would you please let me come
inside.’ He sounded reasonable so we let him in. Father Hoppin, as thin as he was serious, was one of the priests from the Renaissance church of Saint Onne’s, perhaps the third or fourth oldest building in Entralla. His mother happened to live on Pult Street, he had brought the candles when everybody else brought food and drink. Yes, we recognised him, what was his suggestion? He wondered whether it would be possible to move the plasticine city to his church, he would place it in the crypt, people could visit it there without disturbing us. The priest explained that there would always be someone present to watch over the city, that the prayer candles would always be kept at a suitable distance. What did we think?

No.

Under no circumstances.

Utterly impossible.

Quite unthinkable.

‘The city is ours,’ Irva protested, ‘we made it, for us, it belongs to us.’ ‘Yes,’ said Father Hoppin, ‘but consider please that you made the city in more peaceful days, when the laws of ownership were very clear, now everyone must help each other in whatever way they can. You,’ he continued, ‘have a chance to help, to provide comfort, and that is a great gift, surely you will not deny the good people that comfort?’ Irva yelled, ‘But it’s ours, it’s ours!’ He said, ‘Surely, my children, it is everyone’s; the city, after all, belongs to no one person.’ Irva said, ‘You’re ripping it from us!’ He said, ‘No, merely requesting that it be moved to a more public space where more people might marvel at your extraordinary achievement.’ I said, ‘But it’s so delicate, it would take so little for it to be ruined.’ He said, ‘I promise you every effort will be made to ensure its safety, but consider please that plasticine is not a substance that was made to last so very long, consider that in a short time it will have dried out and become brittle, it will be cracked and dirty, and then it will be too late for anyone to learn just what it is that you have created, please give your work the recognition it deserves.’

Irva didn’t speak then. She was beginning to wonder where she would live if the city were moved. Her head between her knees, she was trying to calm herself. At last, she looked up. She reached out,
took hold of one of my hands and of one of Jonas’s and made the following slow and serious announcement, ‘The city shall be moved.’ She nodded. She smiled. She continued. ‘But wherever it goes … I go too.’ It was incomprehensible for her to spend any time away from it. The city could be moved anywhere, perhaps even out of our country, perhaps continents away, that was unimportant to her, what mattered was that she remained by it. She would live, next to the city, inside the crypt of Saint Onne’s Church. She announced her intention to the priest, and in those unhappy days when so many newly homeless people lived inside the undamaged churches of Entralla, he found no reason to argue with her. And I would come too? ‘Of course,’ she said, ‘obviously.’