Alva and Irva (6 page)

‘Linas Dapps: extinct of a weak heart’, the report states. He simply slumped forwards. A doctor’s note stapled to the report mentioned the words ‘Systole’, ‘Ventricle’ and ‘Atrium’ and concluded with the words ‘Mitral Insufficiency’.

Mother realised that if she were to care properly for us, if she were to keep our baby hearts twitching, then she must find some place where the window offered a different view. So Mother left her home, where she had played briefly the role of wife, and entered a new one where she would perform as Mother. And for that she permitted Grandfather to help. Grandfather rented a house on Veber Street, in sector eight of Entralla, far away from post offices, opera houses, theatres and police rooms.

T
HERE WAS
a time when we knew everyone in Veber Street. There were the Misons, mother, father, son, daughter, who had their toy shop on Pilias Street, who all had red hair, except for the daughter who was blonde. There was Plint the butcher, his meagre wife and their aggressive daughter. There was Miss Stott the tailor who seemed ancient when I first remember her but who continued to be ancient, her ancientness becoming ever more convincing over the following years. There was Fiff the baker who lived with his red-faced wife, whom he was rumoured to have beaten frequently, and their three sons over at number twenty three. And there was Jonas Lutt who lived on his own, but who was very rarely at home, and who had just become a long-distance lorry driver.

For a while Veber Street and those streets that connected to it were all that we needed to know of the world, it was our corner of existence, our village in a city, Entralla in microcosm. Everything that we learnt and saw could be contained within it: Veber Street, Pilias Street, Umper Street, Hill Street, W. Glinksy Street and Eemar
Walk. Pilias Street was our Mecca, since it contained the most shops (we supposed then that there was nowhere else so colourful, nowhere so populated), and beyond it lay places and people we scarcely even thought of. But mainly, and certainly to begin with, it was just Veber Street for us.

W
E DO NOT
recall our arrival on Veber Street, we were too young. But surely one day we did arrive and once inside our new home Mother shut the door behind her and closed all the shutters on the ground floor. When the people of the street came knocking in the hope of introducing themselves, Mother would not answer. When Mother shopped for her provisions she left us at home, safe, she presumed, huddled up together, surrounded by the bars of our shared cot. And as she shopped she would not allow herself to be drawn into conversation.

Our poor mother had become a mother and a widow on the same day at the age of seventeen. Mother’s brain had formed the words ‘recluse’, ‘hermit’, ‘anchorite’ and ‘misanthrope’, and found it liked them very much. Mother had decided never to let anyone come into her home, no. 27 Veber Street, except for the inevitable prying glare from her visiting father. There would be no such thing even as Veber Street for us baby girls, the world would be reduced to no. 27. But ‘27’ was what was written on the outside of the house, and so that too must be lost. All that was important were the rooms and levels of this new home. In this new world the continents of Africa and America and Asia would not be permitted to exist, nor would the great blueness of the Pacific and Indian and Atlantic oceans. The world had become dehydrated, it had withered and shrunk and breathed in until it had taken on the exact dimensions of a house in our city.

T
HE FIRST THING,
Irva used to tell me, that she could ever remember was waking up alone. She sensed that she was about to die. She screamed and screamed. Mother came in and put on the lights, and there was I on the floor. Limp Alva. I’d banged my head. I’d
managed to climb over the bars of the cot and got out. Mother fixed the bars higher.

T
HESE WERE
our first words.

Irva: ‘Alva’.

Alva: ‘Alva’.

S
OMETIMES WE
would play under the kitchen table with wooden building blocks and also with Lego from the country of Denmark. I did the building, Irva passed the bricks to me. And sometimes Mother would read to us.

Mother had one book with her for company, a manual on baby care (translated from the English), which she read and reread as if its ordered chapters and recommendations were some profound treatise or the collected works of a master poet. In much the same way as people recite great memorised chunks of the Bible in moments of distress, in later life Mother would incongruously quote from her book on babies. I remember her, years after Irva and I had grown up, whispering this one day in the kitchen as she was waiting for the kettle to boil: ‘To burp the child place him in an upright position against your shoulder and gently pat his back or behind to help him bring up his wind. Do not be frustrated when baby refuses to burp, it does not mean that he is ill or abnormal; sometimes this process takes time. When he burps, consider that a victory. And congratulate yourself.’

Over the years Mother’s freckles, the one remnant of her childhood, faded. Her stomach grew to keep her depression company. Her depression was there to keep alive the memory of Father. She fed it well, she stroked it, she looked after it. It was her miserable, heavy friend. The memory of Father was evident to us throughout our childhood in the form of a wooden, three-legged stool. Mother had Grandfather bring Father’s stool from the post office to our home in Veber Street. The stool always stood on a side table in the kitchen, where we were frequently encouraged to consider it, to touch it even; to begin with Irva and I believed our mysterious father was
a stool and not a person at all. On special occasions Mother would take the stool down from its table and allow us to sit on it. We’d take it in turns to sit on the stool. When I was sitting on the stool, Irva would sit on my lap and vice versa. And, a little later, but I’ll mention it now since we’re considering Father and his stool, Grandfather said, looking at the stool, ‘Some people, like some buildings, are built well and last long; others, poorly constructed, soon collapse. It’s how it is. Rootless. No foundations. What did you expect?’

The early death of Father had made Mother morbid. She was horrified at how complicated human beings are; she didn’t understand all those components and wires within every one of us; she feared that once something had gone wrong inside, no matter how slight, death must inevitably follow. She was terrified of illnesses, at how many there were out there in the world, beyond our home, at how they waited for their moment in and around other humans. She saw death all over the city, all over the streets. Every sneezing passer-by meant to pass chronic pneumonia onto us; every shop owner sprinkled arsenic on his products; every car and every trolley bus harboured desires to swerve up onto the pavement. Whenever she looked at us she could see us dead. She saw our slumped forms in horrible poses, after a multitude of expirations. Asphyxiated by leaking gas. Drowned in the bath. With our skulls shattered after we had fallen from a window. She could never relax her protection, never once; the moment she did, Irva or I, or perhaps both of us, would cease to be. Of this she was certain. Each morning when she found us alive, she took hold of her book on baby care, kissed its cover and blessed it.

T
HERE WAS
little then to differentiate us from each other. Our eyes were the same shade of blue, our hair the same length and colour, our skin was identically pale and thin and revealed the same streams of blue-green veins on our big foreheads and on our arms and legs. But sometimes Mother would see me pressing myself against the front door, peering cautiously through the keyhole. And at other
times she might open the large cupboard in the kitchen where the saucepans were kept to find Irva inside, huddled up in the darkness.

I
T WAS OF
course Grandfather and not Mother who took us on our first remembered excursions out into the world. First in a pushchair, a double pushchair with twin seats, and later, taking each of us by a hand, he would take us out to see Veber Street and sometimes even some of what existed beyond (but never past Pilias Street). And people, women mostly, would often stop Grandfather, and together they would talk about us, and sometimes our heads would be patted (which we never liked), and often, from our pushchair or later standing either side of, and probably even clinging to, Grandfather’s legs, we would hear the word, ‘Lovely’, or the sentence ‘Aren’t they gorgeous?’ But always, always, ‘How can you tell them one from the other, postmaster?’ And of course he would have to reply, ‘Well, actually I can’t, but their mother can.’ And the other person would respond with the air of an expert, ‘Well, yes, you’d expect that, wouldn’t you, that’s the maternal bond, isn’t it?’

A
MONG THE
many gifts Grandfather bought us was a stamp album. How overjoyed he was while watching us peer through our (identical) magnifying glasses, examining so studiously all the little colourful squares of paper. But Grandfather was never once permitted to bring us foreign stamps. Mother was quite clear about that. And just to make sure, all the stamps were examined by her before being passed on (with what nostalgia did she one day inspect a set of stamps depicting beetles), for death was lurking in those foreign stamps. Our weak and dreamy father had been taken in by their bright and beautiful colours; it wouldn’t happen to us.

A
ND SO CAME
the time of our first adventures in plasticine. Grandfather was the one who supplied us with our first packet of plasticine: multicoloured strips, clean and corrugated, neatly covered in transparent sheets of plastic to prevent them from becoming dirty and sheathed in a bright red cardboard box. The front of the
box bore the legend ‘HERKIN’S PLASTICINE’, the reverse ‘HERKIN’S TOYS, 12-23 MIRCAN STREET, SECTOR 2, ENTRALLA 2006’. Grandfather had shown us some of his matchstick children, but had urged us not to come too close, never to touch. We had sat watching him, sitting holding hands on the sofa, rigid with attention, such informative hours contemplating Grandfather carefully building away. But when it had come to our turn to build with matchsticks, when grandfather had reluctantly sacrificed a few matchsticks and a blob of glue, our creations had been a great disappointment. We were unable to make matchsticks resemble anything other than … matchsticks. So Grandfather bought us plasticine, an easier building material. Suitable for novices; ages four and up.

At first we made nothing more miraculous than multicoloured spheres comprised of all the different strips of plasticine moulded into one marbled, curdling riot of colour. These spheres collected dust and dirt and frustrated us enormously because, once mixed, the colours were almost impossible to separate. In time, with greater patience we made other things: birds so ill-proportioned that they could never fly, mongrel dogs of indiscernible parentage, houses that would never stand up for long. But that was all it took; we had worked out how malleable plasticine was. We had worked out that, with care, structures that remained standing could perhaps be erected; from plasticine we could fashion the world in miniature.

We spent much time in the attic looking out of the window (despite Mother’s protestations) onto Veber Street, wondering about all the life there. And one day I decided, and Irva cautiously agreed, to make a model of the street, not just a quick model that would take us a few hours to build, but a complex work that would take weeks and perhaps even months to finish: a highly detailed miniaturisation of exactly what was seen from our window. It was constructed entirely from red blocks of plasticine which we purchased with Grandfather from the Misons’ toy shop. How difficult it was to learn the buildings of Veber Street. How we struggled to see them properly for the first time. How plasticine helped us to understand.

But our first real plasticine model was unskilled and inaccurate. We lacked the patience at this early stage, and it was abandoned after only five days’ work. But it was historically, crucially, inevitably from those days onwards that our fingers always smelled of plasticine.

T
HEN CAME
Grandfather’s unpleasant and aggressive visits. He demanded we spend our days out in Veber Street, where other children played. Grandfather said we mustn’t spend all day indoors, he even shouted at Mother. He thought that it would have been better if he had never shown us his matchstick masterpieces; that he would have done better to have brought us up on a diet of stamps. Stamps every day. And now what had happened to those stamps he had given us? They remained neglected in our bedroom; he hadn’t seen us studying them for months. Would we ever grow up to be worthy of the post office, which he hoped would one day be father to us fatherless girls? Now, whenever Grandfather came to visit, he would begin by hauling us down from our attic hideout and pushing us, despite Mother’s hysterical fear and protestations, into Veber Street, bellowing at us all the while. He would not be placated, even when Mother desperately rattled a box of kitchen matches in his face.

On Grandfather’s first unpleasant visit (after he had yelled at us—‘Go on then, go and make friends!’), we two, sitting on our front doorstep, with the front door locked behind us, came to an important decision: that Mother had been lying. Because if Mother wasn’t lying we would be dead.

‘If you’re out of my sight or out of your grandfather’s sight, even for a moment, you’ll die.’ That’s what Mother said. It had happened once before, she told us. On the only day that Mother had been unable to be with Father, on the day we were born, Father had suddenly collapsed. And all because Mother couldn’t see him. That’s what Mother said. And so, as we sat on the doorstep together, where neither Mother nor Grandfather could see us, we had to conclude that Mother had been lying. But, we asked each other that day, what would happen if we were to lose sight of each other?
We shuddered at the horror. What would happen if we were to be separated, properly separated: yes, what then? This evil was considered by us for many minutes on the doorstep, and we concluded that separation, true separation, would surely be the death of us. It was because of our hearts of course, we decided, which had magnets in them, or cogs, or switches or some such, that worked only if they were close together. Each, we decided together on the doorstep, sent out signals to the other, complicated signals. And those signals, those codes, kept our hearts beating. ‘If we were to be truly separated,’ I said to Irva, ‘then there would be no more Irva.’ ‘Nor,’ said Irva to me, ‘would there be any more Alva.’