Alva and Irva - Edward Carey [15]
Please note the wooden seat next to Louis. It is empty. It is always empty now. It was once filled with the ample behind of a man named Kurt Laudus. Here rests, if not a character from this book, then a ghost of a character from this book. The Kurt who once sat on this stool was the same Kurt who once worked in our Central Post Office, but who was never, despite a postmaster’s hopes, to fall in love with one Dallia Dapps, née Grett. Kurt loved only men, and his greatest love was Louis, a love which Louis’s customers never spoke openly about, for such a love was officially prohibited then. Kurt once squandered Louis’s ever-constant attentions on a student of archaeology from Entralla University, and it was because of this that Louis smashed all his cups and glasses and also, a short while later, Kurt’s face.
But Kurt Laudus has left us now, embraced by a collapsing building one July 16th, during our earthquake adventure. The chair is occupied only by memory: histories from the brain of a vague and snow-white, gently dying, mourning lover.
Here also should be, slouched over the bar, nonchalantly working through one of the day’s many tall, half-pint glasses of local blonde beer (highly recommended, incidentally), Lavinja Cetts, Ambras Cetts’s daughter. You will remember at what promise-filled moment we left Ambras’s career (and what results his over-eagerness had on the progression of the twins’ history). Well, here now is his forty-year-old daughter, shaking slightly, aggressive with loneliness and stooped over by it also, who is paying the price for the phenomenally successful life of her impeccable father
Enjoy your coffee.
PART TWO
Alva & Irva
AN OVER-PROTECTIVE
MOTHER ONCE LIVED ON
VEBER STREET
Residential Streets
Taking trolley bus 5-heading out of the city, away from Cathedral and Market Squares-you will quickly find yourself entering a residential area of the city Do not be frightened. Here is where the real stories are kept, not in the larger, more imposing structures of Entralla’s centre, but rather inside its ordinary domestic dwellings. Certainly the guidebook to our city will not advise you to take trolley bus route 5, unless it is heading in the opposite direction, but that is one of many failings of that book. Take the stop at Pilias Street in sector eight of our city, from there it is a short stroll to Veber Street, where this chapter shall be focused.
MOTHER HELD AT each breast an Alva or an Irva. While I struggled and wriggled with life, unable to lose the feeling of delight for movement, Irva kept very still. Only her eyes seemed to move, following Mother’s actions with the disapproving look of an ancient. I was easy to feed, clamping my mouth to Mother’s nipples and sucking with so ferocious an energy that Mother believed she could feel herself emptying out. But Irva had to be carefully encouraged; she kept turning her heavy head away from the nipples as if away from life, and often Mother had to feed her with a bottle, and often she was sick.
THIS IS HOW we looked, these were the gifts we were given: from Mother pale skin and dark hair; from Father big heads and weak hearts. Not much of an inheritance.
Mother returned to her flat on Napoleon Street with two more little lives than she had left it and with one less big one. How the flat smelt of Father. From one window she could look out and see Napoleon Street down which Father had been escorted away from the post office towards the police buildings, already so pale, already with strange shooting pains in his arm. Whenever she looked out of the window, Mother saw Father being taken away again and again. In her mind she saw him, night and day, being escorted down the street, and, once out of sight, quickly reappearing again, still under escort, still crying the same tears. And no one ever came running to help him. Weak and dreamy