Alva and Irva (26 page)

And so Jonas Lutt lifted Irva up once more. And so the central portion of the plasticine city was moved to the crypt of Saint Onne’s Church. Seven hearses arrived the next day through the ruptured streets to fetch it. And later Jonas came in his lorry with the rest of the city, with all the boxes, which were piled up in a disused chapel in the corner of the crypt. Soon there were candles again, all around the city. Soon there were rows of kneelers and fifty or more people quietly fingering rosaries. On occasions a priest delivered his prayers over the city and sometimes the choir would even sing around it. Father Hoppin told us that the plasticine model brought hope to our people. It was all rubble outside the crypt, but at least there was hope inside, people adored the miniature city, it was an exhibit that spoke of their own lives, and they found solace there. And Irva, smiling, felt a part of something, felt that she belonged, more than ever before. People would come and talk to us, every type of person, old ones, children, nuns, lovers, men in suits, they would ask us about our city, and always then it was Irva who answered.

They were so interested in us during those days. How they noticed us! How they looked at us and marvelled: two long women in the darkness of the crypt, sitting quietly on a pew together, surrounded by boxes, illuminated by the candles around a plasticine metropolis. Perhaps some of them even wondered if we were saints. Perhaps Irva was beginning to believe she was a saint, she could certainly hold a solemn pose for the longest time and she never once
pulled her hand away when an old woman wished to kiss it. Sometimes we’d sit quietly with Jonas in between us, his hands around our shoulders, gently stroking.

A
BOUT A MONTH
after the plasticine city had taken up its new residence in Saint Onne’s crypt, a man in a perfectly fitting suit, woke us early one morning. We crawled out from under our blankets. He told us in pronounced whispers, to add to the import of his message, that our mayor, Ambras Cetts, had been informed of the existence of the plasticine city and had even visited the crypt of Saint Onne’s, two days ago. We had noticed him; did the man talking to us now, think that we wouldn’t notice this new visitor wearing chains of gold around his neck? Ambras Cetts, we were told, had been very impressed with what he had seen. ‘Yes?’ Irva yawned. (She was so used to impressed people by then.) Ambras Cetts had even insisted the Reconstruction Committee visit the city. So that was the party of men, we realised, in perfectly fitting suits. ‘Well?’ The model, the man told us, was potentially most useful in their work, particularly since so many maps and photographs of the city had been destroyed in the People Street fire. The plasticine city had answered many questions for them, and it was useful in arguing against the international officials when they wanted only to put simple cheap buildings up where once great architecture had stood. With the help of the plasticine city, with the international officials actually viewing the entire city as it once was, our politicians would perhaps make major progress. Something as simple, our visitor informed us in his ponderous whispers, as plasticine was swaying grown men. It had become their blueprint for rebuilding the city, it had become indispensable to them. ‘In a way the plasticine model had’, he said, ‘saved our city.’ And Irva nodded with equal seriousness, she entirely believed him.

The man wanted to ask permission to have the city moved again. To a lighter place where it could be more easily viewed. It had all been thought through, he said, we had only to agree. It would be taken to one of the conference rooms in the City Hall, the public would no longer be allowed to visit it. It was called to higher things,
reconstruction architects and politicians wanted it now. Besides, it would be better looked after, the man whispered, in the City Hall. ‘But,’ Irva said, ‘Do you want all of the city or only the central part?’ He didn’t understand. She showed him the other boxes. ‘What’s in those boxes?,’ he asked. ‘Entralla,’ she said, and opened a box so he could see. The man looked shocked, no longer in whispers he said, ‘But all the boxes … It’s enormous … All Entralla?’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘We didn’t finish, we were unable to finish because of the earthquake.’ The man scratched his head. He said, ‘It won’t fit in any of the conference rooms.’ Irva said, ‘No, most probably it won’t, it’s very big, you see, very big.’

O
VER THE NEXT
few days different men in suits came to visit Saint Onne’s and to measure the boxes and to do sums and finally they said that they had found a place in which the whole city could be fitted. A warehouse, in Outer Entralla. And so the city was moved once more. This time in army trucks. And we were moved with it.

S
O THE DUST
sheets of my days were pulled away, Irva wound me up with encouragement and her new-found confidence, she shuffled me unsteadily back to plasticine construction. We slotted the city together. No one else was permitted to help. It took us nearly two weeks. Their calculations had been faulty, they had to keep extending the large table (which was really several large tables bolted together) they had built entirely for our city—that table which we slept under in army sleeping bags at night. ‘More?’ they kept asking us. ‘Yes, more,’ we’d say, ‘More. More.’

To see it in its entirety! Laid out in its completeness! All plasticine Entralla! Each chipboard square by chipboard square, slowly expanding. Only then did we truly understood the enormity of our work, only then could we understand the size of Entralla, the weight of it. And when the official people came to see it they gasped. Had we really done all this by ourselves, we had of course, no one else, don’t you believe us? ‘But why?’ they asked, ‘Why had we?’ I told them, with shrugs, ‘Maybe because we were lonely.’ And we had to
admit that it was incomplete. And that it was impossible to finish now of course.

Then we met Ambras Cetts, who was the man, unintentionally perhaps, who had killed our father. I was going to tell him, but instead we both just sat, smiling, nervous. This was our mayor, our mayor was talking to us, to Irva and to me! ‘Excellent work,’ he told us. ‘Very useful,’ he said. ‘True patriots,’ he said. ‘Goodbye,’ he said.

We never once replied to any of his comments.

W
E WERE TO
become a story for the digestion of the Entrallan populace. We were, with our plasticine city, to be pushed forward as an example of the Entrallan spirit. We were to be made a fuss of. They took photographs of us standing near the city, and on one occasion Ambras Cetts came to stand in between us and smiled his smile which made us forgive him almost instantly, even for Father’s death. (We’re taller than Ambras Cetts, we measured him, one hundred and seventy-two centimetres, how small he looked in those photographs with Irva and me either side of him.) They published articles about us. ‘
ALVA AND IRVA, TRUE CITIZENS OF ENTRALLA
’. One said, ‘
PLASTICINE TWINS SAVE CITY
’. ‘How ridiculous!’ we cackled, ‘Some people will probably think we’re made of plasticine!’ They wrote how useful our work was in recovering Entralla. They made up strange stories about how each and every building was accurately measured, about how Grandfather and Mother had helped us, about how Father had died trying to save people in an old earthquake years back. One article even said: ‘Michelangelo with his marble, Rembrandt with his oils, Alva and Irva with their plasticine.’ They made huge posters which they stuck on giant billboards. Between a man on his horse in a cowboy hat advertising cigarettes and a nearly naked woman with a great waterfall of blonde hair standing in a sunflower field advertising shampoo, could be found Alva and Irva advertising hope. With the caption: ‘
IF THEY CAN BUILD THE CITY, SO CAN WE’.
The North scars on our foreheads, we noticed, had been airbrushed out.

T
HERE WAS
much talk in those days, and many arguments, about whether the actual city should be carefully reconstructed as it once was or whether the past should be forgotten and a new fresher city be made in its place. Mostly, people wanted the old Entralla back, and the designs put forward which gave the damaged parts of the city exact gridded streets with exact squares were quietly put aside. Many new buildings were to be built of course but mostly in the outer circles of Entralla and certainly never in the old town, which was to be carefully rebuilt in its former beauty (except for the Paulus Boulevard; Paulus suffered most of all, ancient, sophisticated buildings would in the future look onto duplicate blocks). Enlarged photographs of the plasticine old town were placed on stands throughout the actual old town. One article said that we, the Dapps twins, had inspired it to be rebuilt, because from our model it was easy to see just how wonderful the old town used to be. And everyone, or so it seemed to us, was talking about the glorious architecture of the old town, when before, when they had seen it every day, they had barely thought of it at all. Ambras Cetts presented us with two plaques on which were keys. We were given the keys of the city of Entralla, and with them came something called the ‘freedom of Entralla’, which we had thought all along was already ours.

T
HEY LET THE
people of Entralla come and see the plasticine city. There were large queues around the warehouse, but they weren’t allowed to come too close, they weren’t allowed to touch. They put ropes around the city, and only we were allowed to go under those ropes. They fixed red velvet curtains all around the edge of the model. Often when all the people came to see the city we would be underneath the massive tables, hidden from sight by the velvet curtains, listening to all those many people talking about plasticine Entralla (talking about themselves, the geography of their lives). We whispered to each other, trying not to cackle too loudly, occasionally peeping out through the curtain to see all the different types of the shoes of the people of Entralla. We remember once someone from a place called Wibb Street complained because Wibb Street hadn’t been built with plasticine; it was as if his home didn’t exist.
But it did exist, we hadn’t reached it, it was too far out, that was all. On that day there was also an art critic from one of the newspapers, and he said: ‘Such is the way with all art. All art, my dear fellow from Wibb Street, can never be totally completed, only, in the end, abandoned unfinished.’

And that was how we passed our days mostly, under the table of our city. And when the people had gone we’d creep out of our hiding place and look all over the city and see where we thought the plasticine needed repairing. And sometimes Jonas would come and stay with us. But the truth could not be hidden from us. Slowly the city was drying out, losing the sharpness of its colours, we kept putting fresh plasticine over the cracks but the cracks kept coming back, whole squares would have to be replaced, and we couldn’t get to the centre of Entralla without dismantling the table which the entire city was standing on, and they wouldn’t let us do that, and we saw how grey with dust Lubatkin’s Fortress had become. And as the city declined, as it shrivelled and creased, so, it seemed to me, Irva declined, she shrivelled and creased too. The worse the city’s state became the less Irva was interested in repairing it, she was content to watch me looking after it but unwilling to help. She looked at the cracks, at the gathering dust, at the faded colours, at the dehydrated suburbs, with increasingly detached looks, and she preferred to sleep now when people came to visit the warehouse. She no longer cared about their footwear.

And as the city’s illness increased, as it wrinkled in its old age, it seemed to me from under our table that there were fewer and fewer shoes to watch. Slowly the number of people visiting the city was declining, until in the end there were only ten or so people a day. And the other people who worked in the warehouse said it didn’t seem worth opening it to the public anymore, because the public in those days had lost their passion for plasticine.

Our brief and local fame was over.

A
FTERWARDS, WHEN
the warehouse was closed to visitors, I would leave Irva sleeping under the table, and walk about the city and see that the large advertising posters of us were hardly anywhere
anymore and when I did see them often they would have been graffitied over. Our teeth had been blackened out or naked breasts had been drawn over us and once I even saw drawings of men’s penises right next to our faces. I defaced one poster myself, I tiptoed up in the train station, I added two arrows, pointing upwards, and two ‘Ns’.

And then all the posters were covered up. And if there were any articles about us now they were mostly unkind articles that said we were backward, that Irva was practically feral, that we had deliberately cut ourselves off from people even as we were amongst them. One article stated, ‘It is a true sign of the insignificance of our city that whilst other cities have artists like Michelangelo who work with marble, or Rembrandt who paints in oils, we must have two introverted women who play with a substance designed for infant usage: plasticine.’

I knew why all this was. It was because it was taking so long to reconstruct Entralla, a year already and still so much of it was rubble. People wanted to forget about the earthquake, they wanted to cheat themselves with lies about it never having happened. They never looked up at the cranes and they cursed the plasticine city. They wanted to get on with their lives, they wanted to forget us.