Alva and Irva - Edward Carey [17]
THE 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.
THESE WERE our first words.
Irva: ‘Alva’.
Alva: ‘Alva’.
SOMETIMES 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