Alva and Irva - Edward Carey [10]
Father, who were you beyond stamp-licker, post office step-sitter, impregnator?
Our father, Orphan Linas, Linas the Potent, was one of those people who seemed to understand suffering. A child’s scream after it has fallen over; an old man hauling in his breath; the everyday bravery a fat woman uses to sit down: the sadness of these things deprived him of sleep.
Sometimes the pain he would see exhibiting itself every day on the city streets would dry up his movement and would stand him rigid, clenched in sorrow. To think that pain was so ordinary, so widespread, that pain was everywhere, that it was impossible to walk out into the streets without witnessing it. How could Father live with this knowledge? I imagine Father now, not atop his lavatory bowl but standing still on a street pavement, the weak engine of his body stalled. His huge eyes are evidence of his sensitivity. His pale skin is so thin you feel you could easily stroke it off. I imagine his eyebrows permanently high on his great forehead, so easily is he surprised, so easily is he distressed. People passing him standing motionless in the street, halted by other people’s pain, may think, ‘How will his heart last?’ Oh, Father was not a good design, rather he was a failure of nature, a whim perhaps that was not meant to survive long. So large a face, so sad and so timid, but somehow, perhaps because of the honest intensity of its expression, so handsome.
But this night, which I return to now, this night as Father sits on the lavatory seat, he has wept the sorrow out of himself, letting it drip down his face, into his lap, onto his cigarette. With a hiss his cigarette has sighed out of life, and he moves now off his lavatory perch and back into the room where his pregnant wife sleeps on.
SO NOW FATHER, in search of comfort, turns his mind elsewhere. In his leather satchel, which is locked, even from Mother, is a small part of Father’s prodigious collection of foreign stamps. The other stamps, a vast hoard, are secreted away underneath the rotting floorboards of the attic of the abandoned house on Foundry Lane with the dangerous, finger-pinching floorboards. Father collects his satchel and returns to the bathroom and from there he journeys around the world.
With the speed it takes him to place each foreign-stamped envelope in front of the last, he travels from city to city, from continent to continent. He thinks little of crossing from one end of Europe to the other in a second, nor is he impressed, as his fingers pass from envelope to envelope, that he has just strode the enormity of the Atlantic. What does he care for that, he who can traverse the length of long Siberia between breaths, while we lesser beings leave Moscow and take five weeks to arrive in Vladivostok and step onto the railway platform exhausted and angry. Watch him sniff and kiss those stamps. His fingers, his eyes, his lips do all the travelling. This childish man, who is our father, is attempting to breathe in, to see, to feel all the smells, sights and touches of the world in one greedy instant.
Father, who would never travel beyond our country’s borders, was fascinated by the world. So what, thought father, if the stamps had been franked, if their innocence had been deprived them, so what when they had come from a foreign country, when it was a foreign person, whose life Father struggled to comprehend, who performed the franking. And he often wondered: What is the taste of foreign stamp glue?
Father had stolen every stamp in his foreign stamp collection. He stole them from work, from the post office. He stole the international post. If an envelope came to our city with AIR MAIL or PAR AVION proudly written on it, it may just as well have said MAIL FOR LINAS.
True, Father was really only interested in the stamps—he paid little attention to the envelopes. But how could he deliver letters with the stamps missing—what would people say to that? What excuse could he possibly give? No, he could not risk delivery, so he kept the letters to himself. Though he loved