• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 802 0

‘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.

IN 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