Alva and Irva (9 page)

T
HERE WERE SO MANY
school days it’s difficult to know what to leave in or what to take out. There was the time when we became ill with the chickenpox (ill at exactly the same time) and the enormous trouble Irva had stopping me from scratching my spots because she insisted there should be no markings on us to tell us one from the other. But I don’t want to talk about all that nonsense. So I’ll skip onwards now until Irva and I became great builders of plasticine, until the time when after school (leaving Mother at the school gates, walking her much slower steps, way behind us—such great strides we had after all) we would come to our attic to construct a city in which we would be happy residents, which was not, certainly not, the city of Entralla. Alvairvalla, as Irva named this place, was a very practicable utopia, and was the first city we built out of plasticine. It was not a very large city, having only forty or fifty buildings.

The important thing for us to remember as we built it was that it was a city for us only, it was built by us and for us, for no one else. Even Mother would not be allowed to enter Alvairvalla. There was only one law in this city which was a huge ‘Keep Out’ to anyone who wasn’t either Irva or me. In fact Irva wrote ‘KEEP OUT’ on the attic hatch. Mother knocked on the hatch, ‘Can’t you read?,’ Irva said, or, ‘You’re not blind, are you, Mother, all of a sudden?’ Mother was not happy about the city of Alvairvalla and she told us so. She didn’t like us always being up in the attic, quietly whispering to each other, she never wanted us to be such private children. She wanted us to share everything with her, but we couldn’t, it wasn’t natural. We did spend time with Mother when we felt a little sorry for her, sometimes we’d brush her hair for her, sometimes we’d paint her fingernails—though she never went out to see anyone. ‘I’m so alone,’ she’d say again and again, or, ‘Do you love me, Alva? Do you love me, Irva?’ We’d tell her yes, but she’d often say, ‘You don’t, no you don’t, I know you don’t. You don’t have any room for me at all.’ Mother wanted to be a citizen of Alvairvalla, but we couldn’t allow it. She might have been happy just to be a tourist, just to visit this phenomenon of architectural harmony for a few days, to stay perhaps in one of the two large hotels we built, but
Alvairvalla required no tourists to keep its economy functioning and the two citizens of Alvairvalla didn’t like people snooping about. In fact, there was another law in the city of Alvairvalla: that should some foreigner ever visit the city, the city would immediately crumble to dust.

Architecturally, Alvairvalla, like Barcelona in Spain, was a city constructed on a grid. It was an ideal city of perfect balance between left and right, north and south, east and west. Each half of the street was a mirror of the other half and each street had an identical street on the other side of the city. There were two of every building—one made by Irva, the other by me. We had two churches, two hotels, two central post offices, and no schools. The residential houses were based upon our home in Veber Street, sometimes being a pair of tall versions of the house, sometimes twinned squat versions.

I realise now that the buildings of the city were very unskilfully made, mostly being just oblongs inexpertly carved, but at the time we considered the work to be of unrivalled genius. We were very happy with our city and we always rushed home to see it. It began to govern us. We built a plasticine wall (ten centimetres thick) around the city for protection. We worried about it constantly.

I
N SCIENCE CLASS
we were taught about the sexual life of wingless
aphidae
(or plant lice), which reproduce asexually (all the baby insects being clones). After that class, during which we noticed that certain of our school fellows had been staring at us, giggling, I pronounced that other people should be allowed to visit the sterile city of Alvairvalla after all. I said the city would die if its two inhabitants never had any children, it would be left empty forever, with perpetually quiet streets, with constantly unoccupied rooms and it would remain in this state, in this void of loneliness because no one except us knew how to find the city, it wasn’t on any of the maps anywhere. Alvairvalla, I instructed, would need a third citizen after all, but not Mother, it would have to be a male.

Irva didn’t talk to me for a week.

After that silent week, she couldn’t bare it any more. She said, ‘Yes’ and ‘All right then.’ And so the Quiet Boy entered our history.

I
CALLED HIM
the Quiet Boy because he never seemed to speak to anyone. His real name was Girin Lang. He was a year below us at school, and he must have been the most inconspicuous boy in all the world because we didn’t notice him for such a long time and generally when we were in the playground we were constantly watching everyone. I used to enjoy watching friendships in the playground, observing them pensively, wondering what they might feel like. And Irva watched me watching friends, but without happiness.

But somehow the Quiet Boy had eluded our gaze before; this Quiet Boy had somehow achieved inconspicuousness. There he was in another corner of the playground, virtually invisible. I became fascinated by him. We would always leave the classroom now in the breaks, just so that I might watch him in the playground. There was so little that was distinguishable about him, except the fact that he wore glasses, which somehow seemed to make him even more hidden, as if his spectacles were a mask. One day we became a little braver, and we managed to be out in the playground before him and positioned ourselves in his particular corner. He came walking towards it, quietly, inconspicuously as always, changing his course now and then to get out of the way of the more noisy and conspicuous boys, who didn’t seem to notice him at all, and then as he was almost at the corner he finally saw us. What horror in his little face, what panic. He stood still, stunned for a moment, and then turned around quickly and went back inside the school. I saw him closer that time than I had ever seen him before and I noticed then that one of the lenses of his glasses was gummed up. And then I realised there was something conspicuous about him after all, the boy had a severe squint. One of his eyes saw only Irva, the other only me. In comparison to us, of course, his squint was an amateur in the great circus of conspicuousness, it was a shy and modest and retiring thing. We approached him the next day in the playground, I even spoke to him: ‘My sister and I live in Veber Street. We weren’t born
there, we were born in Saint Mirgarita of Antioch Street, in the hospital that’s there. Our father’s dead. He died on Napoleon Street. Where do you live?’

When he still refused to speak to us even after our generous words, we followed him all the way to his home which was on Verres Square (way out of our usual route, and I have to admit that twice we became utterly lost as we retraced our way towards home and when I asked people the way they said that they didn’t know and that they’d never heard of Veber Street or even of Pilias Street, so in the end, and with Irva frightened and in tears, fearing we’d never find home again, we had to walk all the way to Napoleon Street, which was of course a street that people had heard of, and from there we were able to find home, but always, always it was I, and not Irva, who asked the questions). We followed him for about a week. And I’m sure he noticed us following him, because he’d break into a run just as we were reaching Verres Square and when we turned the corner into the square he wasn’t there at all. We knew he lived somewhere on the square but we couldn’t be sure which house, we didn’t know his exact address. Ah, but we knew someone who would. So the next Saturday morning we went on a trip to Napoleon Street to find that extraordinary man who knew where everybody lived, who was known to us simply as Grandfather. We gave Grandfather Girin’s surname and told him that he lived in Verres Square and from that Grandfather was able to work out the precise location of where the elusive fellow was hiding from us: no. 12. And then I said to Grandfather, ‘We wish to send him a present.’ ‘A Valentine?,’ he asked with a smile. ‘No Grandfather,’ Irva said in a panic, ‘It’s April, as you well know.’ We showed Grandfather the present. It was a plasticine model just the same as the one we had, of the Littsen Street school though without any scratches on it. Grandfather looked offended. ‘You’ve been modelling,’ he said, ‘and you didn’t tell me.’ (Grandfather always wanted us to ask his advice, he felt that it was impossible for us to model without it.) ‘I don’t recognise the model,’ he said, ‘What’s it of?’ But we knew he recognised it. Of course he did. I put it in a cardboard box and put scrunched-up newspaper around it for protection. As I was sealing
it up Irva taped a needle on the inside of the box’s lid so that that would be the first thing the addressee (a word we learnt from Grandfather) would see and underneath the needle I wrote ‘© ALVA AND IRVA DAPPS’. ‘Why the needle?,’ Grandfather asked us. When I told him it was to make pock marks on the school, he only went, ‘Hem,’ and looked disapproving. And so it was sent. And on Tuesday morning it had arrived, but not in time for school. But on Wednesday morning we were certain he had it because he didn’t even come out into the playground after class. Well, we were offended of course. But we wouldn’t give up, not that easily, though Irva suggested that perhaps we should. And then, mercifully, along came the annual school project to help out.

MANDATORY EXCURSION. LUBATKIN’S TOWER. The history of our city is considered one of the most important subjects for young pupils. Our most celebrated local figure is of course Grand Duke Lubatkin. Lubatkin, for those ignorant of Entralla’s magnificent past, was the great warrior who expanded the territory of this region of our country, until eventually other countries joined together and laid siege to our city. (The largest piece of civic sculpture in all Entralla is the impressive equestrian statue of Lubatkin at the foot of Prospect Hill.)

Look about you, turn around until you see … there, at the summit of Prospect Hill, the ruins of the fortress built and protected by Grand Duke Lubatkin. No trolley bus numbers are needed for this excursion—the remaining tower is visible from almost everywhere in the city. Simply use it as your marker and meander through our streets towards it. Climb the two hundred and eighteen steps of Prospect Hill until the tower is reached. Built between 1170 and 1225, it was here that Lubatkin defended the honour of our country, until he too succumbed to death. Not by arrow or by sword but through the horrors of an earthquake. The whole population of our city which was under siege at that time is reported to have died in the quake. It was said afterwards, in the closing section of our oral epic, ‘The Entralliad’, which every Entrallan knows by heart, that
once the earth was still again, ‘Neither scream of child, nor wail of woman, neither bark of dog, nor crow of cock, nor any sound but only quiet, eternal quiet, deathly quiet was left within the broken walls of Lubatkin city on Lubatkin hill in Lubatkin land.’

Do take the time to admire the breathtaking view of the city this position offers where all our buildings from the Gothic to the Renaissance to the Baroque, even until the blocks of flats, dreary estates, speak so eloquently of all of the city’s days, recent and long since past; these buildings are the cast of characters in the great drama of Entralla. It is even possible to see from this observation post some of the gross damage sustained during the most recent earthquake. Walking down almost any street in the centre of our city it is possible to travel forwards and backwards through so many centuries of architectural taste, but here, on Prospect Hill, all secrets are spilled at once. Here, in this view, the entire history of Entralla is indelibly etched on its wondrous skyline. Has ever a city been so legible? There, look at it, there is the past told in our ancient structures, the present in our modern ones and the future under the shadows of the builders’ cranes. Look: history! There is history. As you return to the city, as you are descending the two hundred and eighteen steps of Prospect Hill, imagine that you are accompanied by the shouts and screams of schoolchildren, imagine among those schoolchildren a pair of female twins who seem to be pursuing a bespectacled boy, slightly behind the main group.

A
FTER A COMPULSORY
school trip up Prospect Hill, we were set the task of making something or writing something relating to Grand Duke Lubatkin. This was to take the place of any homework that we might otherwise have been given for three whole weeks. When the weeks were up we were all required, one by one, to ascend the podium in the assembly room and give a brief speech.

Irva and I were absent from the knowledge quest that was ostentatiously exhibiting itself on the large tables of the Central Library on People Street, where boys and girls each attempted to look more studious than the other. What a historic stroking of chins took place in those days as they searched through heavy leather-bound
tomes that smelt so sour, and fingered delicate, ancient and misspelt maps of local towns and cities that looked like the efforts of confused men from the mad houses, so little did their work resemble our country’s modern settlements. But why were Irva and I not in the library? Where were we acquiring our information? What was our project to be? In the years before, our contribution to the school project had been a miserable inconspicuous thing, timorous and unexceptional, but this year there was something to prove, this year I aimed for us to gain the attention and respect of the Quiet Boy. And so it was that our first victory with plasticine occurred and we came first in school.