Alva and Irva (28 page)

I shall not leave Entralla again.

For a month I lived in the International World Hotel until finally I had the courage to admit to myself that I was not going back. Then I rented a small apartment near my mother’s old house on Dismas Street. My mother had died six years before and I’d never known, I’d never felt that she had died, I’ve no idea what I was doing the moment of her death. The pain I now feel because of her death is so surprising to me because of its ferocity. I wake up calling for her. A grown man of fifty so terrified of the dark, calling for his mother! I’ve become one more of those sombre faces in the crowds, full of personal and obscure sadness. My sister married, she has two children, I look at them, I look at my niece and nephew, I touch them, I think: what an achievement. It is not, after all, so easy to lose a family.

I bore people with unspectacular memories of my distant places, I begin my sentences with ‘That reminds me of when I was living in … Of course in such and such a place things are very different …Did I tell you about my journey to…’

To begin with I just walked Entralla. I saw the cathedral, still then with its temporary roof of tin, I walked the Paulus Boulevard and People Street and could not recognise them. I saw Bread Square, site of my father’s death but also of my childhood, I walked and I tried to remember. I had hoped that one day on these visits I would come across Alva or her sister. I allowed myself to imagine Alva asking to marry me, I felt I could picture the scene so accurately. But I did not make any true attempt to find her then. When I did, after nearly two months and longing for company, I searched the telephone book; there were many hundreds of Dapps listed there of course. I rang any with the initial D for Dallia and though I spoke to several Dallia Dapps none was the mother of my friends. Then I rang any A. Dapps and any I. Dapps, again with the same result. I could not find them anywhere. I returned to Veber Street to
discover their house boarded up, leaning at a dangerous angle. There are still many houses like this about the outer streets of Entralla, waiting to be tugged down or rebuilt, a fraction alive but mostly dead. Every now and then, I hear reports on the radio of adventurous children who climb inside them, and then these houses shut like a trap, they collapse, as if they’d been waiting for those children all along.

I looked at the register of the earthquake dead in Tectonic House, which in my youth had been a flower market. I found a Dallia Dapps among the lists but no Alva or Irva Dapps. A young woman there, not I think originally from our city, asked me whom I was searching for. I told her I had been away for a long time, I was looking for my friends, I told her the names, she shrugged, she apologised, but at least, she said, they were not killed in the earthquake. As I was leaving, an older woman who had been mopping the floor stopped me. Was it the twins I was looking for?, she asked. Yes, I said surprised, you know them? No, she said, she never actually knew them, but they were true and great Entrallans. But she had said ‘were’. The twins were dead? Yes, she told me, several years ago. Several years ago.

And in that instant my future life seemed to shrink before me to contain in its cast of characters only a single, nervous August Hirkus. But there would be room enough, there would be so much room in fact, for the memory of twins. I suddenly realised quite how much I missed them.

I
SPENT
the next two weeks patching together Alva and Irva’s lives. The information could, incredibly, be found in the New Public Library on People Street. In the small but growing archive section. I scrolled through the microfiches of old newspapers. People had written articles about my old friends, many articles. Whilst I had been growing increasingly unspectacular thousands of miles away, Alva and Irva were being written about.

I learnt of the transient fame of their plasticine city. In the old newspapers (newspapers collected only since the earthquake) were so many stories of so many lives, but then I scrolled down little
history after little history, and, quite suddenly, there they were. Alva and Irva. I had found them again.

T
HE FACTS
are simple enough. On a particular April morning, Alva Dapps climbed aboard trolley bus 7 with a suitcase. As she travelled from Pult Street, towards the centre of the city, en route to Terminus Road and the train station, there was a brief spasm inside her and her heart ceased to beat. The time of death, the coroner’s report states, was around seven thirty a.m. On that particular morning the trolley bus driver, who was new to his situation, and who was called Andrius Chapin, was not willing to stop the trolley bus despite the fact that he had a dead body inside it. He continued on his normal route, prepared only to make the brief regular stops that the trolley bus company had stipulated, ignoring the protestations of the passengers. This event made, for a very brief time, international news and for a far longer period national news. The reason it appeared in the international news was because some simple Entrallan believed that since Alva was a celebrated person of our city, she would be known throughout the rest of the world, and that therefore all the journalists of the globe would be interested in her demise and so he sent the story off to international news stations. It turned out that foreign newspapers were interested in Alva’s death, but not because of who she was but only because of the manner of her death. Her death, it seems, spoke of the increasingly growing terror people all over the world have of losing their jobs, and what such fear is actually capable of doing to people on a day-to-day level. How frightened we have all become—even in little-known and distant cities such as Entralla.

One local journalist suggested that this final journey of Alva’s on the trolley bus was like the victory laps that athletes like to take after they have run a race. And perhaps, the journalist wondered, if he had been in the trolley bus that day with dead Alva and had looked through the window, he might have seen the buildings in the centre of our city actually bowing to her slumped form, in gratitude for her life. Such stories are, of course, to be dismissed as mere
fancy. But every now and then, I have witnessed Entrallans pausing in their days when a trolley bus slips off its overhead lines and the driver has to put on gloves and with a special rubber hoop realign the cables—such actions, it seems, remind them of the death of Alva.

On the afternoon of her death, when the police knocked on the door of 42 Pult Street to inform the surviving twin of her loss, no one came to answer. A police car waited in the street for someone to return. When, finally, a lorry drove up that night, the occupant of which possessed keys to the house, the police discovered Irva inside, in her bed. Quite still. Her eyes and mouth open. The coroner’s report estimated that Irva had died between half past seven and eight o’clock that morning.

T
HE NAME
of the lorry driver, used several times in the Entrallan newspapers, a name I had not heard of before, was Jonas Simas Lutt. Mr Lutt, I discovered in the telephone book, still lived in that house on Pult Street (where I too now live—in the attic space at the top of the museum). I telephoned him. He remembered my name. We agreed to meet, but where I wondered. The telephone went silent for a while, then he said Café Louis in Market Square, that was a good spot, though he later confessed that he’d never been there himself, only that one of the twins had occasionally mentioned it.

Jonas Lutt is a big man, with slicked-back hair, usually dressed in commonplace jeans and a T-shirt. I would recognise him, he said, by the T-shirt he was wearing of Rouen Cathedral. Jonas and I have become friends. We often go together to that Market Square café with its sullen proprietor. And it was on one of those occasions that he boasted to me that he, Jonas Lutt, an ordinary-looking man from Entralla, a man so ordinary in his features that he would disappear in any crowd, seen as simply a perfectly plausible, unexceptional urban male, that he, this long-distance lorry driver, had an extraordinary secret. For years this man of small conspicuousness had been making love to two women. Not every night, for sure, only on occasions, but nevertheless it had still occurred. A surprising fact perhaps, given the blandness of the confessor, but hardly revolutionary;
such behaviour is certainly not unheard of (even in a Catholic country, perhaps particularly in a Catholic country). But this man, since he first lived in his current address on Pult Street, had been making love to twins, one at a time. One night Alva. The next Irva. How extraordinary Entralla’s version of Casanova is, a tall and tubby lorry driver. No one seeing him walking down a street would suspect this man’s past. He made love to Irva, he made love to Alva (he made love to a map of the world). Until they became too ill. For comfort.

Jonas has told me that when Alva set out with a suitcase that morning he thinks she knew what the outcome would be. He thinks that Alva understood that in separating herself from Irva she would cause their deaths. They had been struggling with living, he said, for so long.

I
ASKED
Jonas what had happened to the plasticine city. He didn’t know, he hadn’t heard about it for years. Probably, he thought, it was destroyed. We decided to find out. The most obvious place to start of course was the place it had last been seen. We journeyed to the warehouse on the outskirts of Entralla, on Illtud Street. There was a rusting padlock on its entrance doors. We couldn’t undo the padlock, we had no saw with us, and just as Jonas was suggesting he should go to fetch one, I gave a final push at the doors and they both, through old age and rot, collapsed into the warehouse and I went tumbling in after them. And there it was. After all that time. The plasticine Entralla. Defaced by dirt and dust, walked over by spiders, with great webs spanning whole sectors of our city, with dead flies and even a dead bird or two upon the cracked surface. Perhaps it no longer really resembled Entralla, but all the same, here it was, the forgotten city.

A
T FIRST
we thought we might be the only people interested in the city but as we worked on it, carefully removing the dirt with tweezers and a slightly dampened cloth, filling in the major cracks, we began to wonder whether such a marvellous creation would not in fact be of considerable interest to many people. In the end we decided
to write a letter to the former mayor, Ambras Cetts, who was living, we discovered, as a virtual recluse inside the International World Hotel, in fact just two floors above the room where I had so recently stayed. We tried not to put our hopes up. We waited. A week later a letter arrived, former mayor Cetts was delighted the city still existed, but he assumed it must be terribly ruined. We sent him photographs. He decided to come and visit it, breaking his vow, since he had been diagnosed with cancer, never to leave the hotel again. He was frail and walked with a stick and a nurse. He wept when he saw it.

Then followed all the fuss; the photographers and journalists’ visits to the city, the public’s increasing demand that they should be allowed to see it too. Entralla was growing obsessed with its history of Alva and Irva. The photographic negative from which the posters of the twins had been made was eventually found, and more posters were printed. People began to buy plasticine, more and more. The Alva and Irva Museum opened in Pult Street. But it was decided that at all costs the miniature city must be preserved from too much disturbance. To appease the public, Lubatkin’s Tower was carefully cut from the city and a cast was taken of it and from the cast many plastic fortresses were made, which were placed beneath small transparent plastic domes, and the domes were filled with liquid and small white plastic flakes. Plastic fortresses, souvenirs of our city. Five thousand were made. Five thousand were sold. A further ten thousand were made. When these too were quickly purchased, more and more were made, until the whole of Entralla became saturated with these miniature fortresses, and in fact today you will be hard-pressed not to find them in almost every newsagent and gift shop throughout the city. You can inflict snowstorms on them, tiny blizzards, diminutive earthquakes even. But still the craving for plasticine did not die out. (Oh little city, with your peculiar obsession!, a whole city’s population with fingers smelling of plasticine; but then perhaps it is not really so extraordinary, not if you consider the Tulip Fever of Amsterdam.) In the end it was decided that the Museum of Entralla should house the miniature city. The museum was still being rebuilt
then after considerable damage from the earthquake. Work was stopped. A special gallery was designed with a special climate that might preserve the city. Work resumed.

S
OME GOVERNMENT
people believe that this history, which has become part of the folklore of Entralla, might help the limited tourist industry of our city. And so the decision to publish this local legend was approved, funds were provided for my translation of Alva’s autobiography—discovered in a neat stack in her late grandfather’s study. A statue was commissioned from our leading sculptor, Conrad Brack, son of the late Constantin, to be placed in Onne Square, just by the church there. It is hoped in time that this statue will be remembered and visited as much as that of the
Manneken Pis
of Brussels or of the
Lille Havfrue
of Copenhagen. People who are not from our city might wonder when they see this sculpture if the twins are our version of the more famous twins Romulus and Remus from the city of Rome in Italy. Let them. (Throughout this book photographs of the memorial sculpture have been displayed; particularly of the buildings at the twins’ feet—based on the actual buildings of the plasticine city to be found in the Art Museum of Entralla. Mr Brack has chosen to depict Alva looking upwards holding a miniature Central Train Station and Irva looking downwards holding a miniature 27 Veber Street.)