Alva and Irva - Edward Carey [30]
ON THE USEFULNESS OF PLASTICINE BUILDINGS 2: HOW TO COME FIRST IN SCHOOL. The second exhibit to be found in Gallery 24 of the Entralla Art Museum is a large model constructed of red plasticine of a historic walled city, within which, on the summit of a hill, are the remains of a fortress. For their entry the twins had created a plasticine model of the architecture of our city built in the time of Grand Duke Lubatkin. But they had not depicted the city as it would have looked through Lubatkin’s eyes, rather they had built it as it would be seen in the present were all the buildings erected since Lubatkin’s time removed. The fortress in their model, for example, is exactly how the fortress appears today. But the old wall which used to surround the fortress was no longer clearly visible and only traces of it remain. Occasionally a clump of ancient bricks is seen connected to a more modern building, or more rarely a trench where a part of the wall had been removed. The twins revealed where in the city pieces of the wall are still present and from that were able to show how our city had grown in size since the time of Lubatkin’s parental care. During all the research for this model not a single book had been consulted. The twins achieved their knowledge by walking around the old town, carefully observing. All the evidence was there to be found, they simply spent the time to discover it.
This model is certainly in the poorest condition of all the exhibits in Gallery 24. Dust so thick it resembles mould particularly distorts the sad fortress. But worst of all is the length of wall at the southern end of this predominantly empty city. This approximately fifty-centimetre-long imitation of ancient masonry has been flattened out of all shape. If it were possible with minuscule tweezers to remove all hairs and skins of dust, an identifiable print of a child’s rather podgy elbow would be found. But the owner of the elbow, a boy called Piter Soffit, was not to blame. He was pushed as the children crowded around the plasticine skeleton of this ancient city. The appearance of Piter Soffit’s elbow robbed the city of its beauty and proved in a swift and clumsy moment its heartbreaking fragility. And how cruel it was that its destruction did not make that shattering sound which so alarmingly and worthily brings us to the attention of broken china or glass, how cruel it was that it could be demolished into an illegible lump without so much as a sigh. The teachers were unable to see amongst that scrum of young students who had pushed the boy, though they suspected that it might have been someone called Kersty Plint. Several pupils insisted that in fact it was not Kersty Plint but a boy called Girin Lang, a rumour which the twins never believed.
AFTER THE SCHOOL project a photograph was taken of us standing before our successful model and later that photograph together with one of the whole school and various essays and drawings by other of our fellow schoolmates were put into a metal tube which was sealed at both ends and buried deep in the school grounds. A time capsule. So that other generations of Entrallans, long after our deaths may learn what it was like to be us. Our plasticine victory was safe for centuries to come.
7INCIDENTALLY—for the sake of our visitors not familiar with the metric system of measurement, the twins Alva and Irva Dapps grew to a height of six foot, two inches.
A LOVE STORY
WRITTEN ON THE CEILING