Alva and Irva - Edward Carey [33]
THREE DAYS after the quake Mr Irt took us all on a school outing. Out of Entralla, actually beyond the city, further than we had ever gone before. He didn’t tell us where we were going at first, only that he would show us what damage an earthquake could do. We travelled in the school bus along ever smaller roads, Irva becoming increasingly anxious, feeling homesick, wondering already if we would ever actually see Entralla again. But I felt a joy inside me, as if I could feel myself growing with every moment that we travelled further, I was stretching out over the curved vastness of the globe. ‘So much to see,’ I said to Irva, ‘Open your eyes, look out of the window, look at that! Look at that!’ But Irva kept her eyes tight shut. ‘How far are we going?,’ she kept asking, ‘How far, Alva, how much further?’ And then quieter, ‘I don’t feel safe, I feel like I’m going to fall any moment, I feel sick.’ She was sick when she got off the bus, and I practically had to push her through the door, she didn’t want to get off, as if that bus was the only proof that she would be returning home, as if it were the only proof that the city of Entralla still existed. ‘I want to go home,’ she said, ‘I want to go home.’ ‘Come on, Irva,’ I said, ‘keep up.’ Keep up, I told her, but she couldn’t keep up, she never could. Even in those days when she tried, she was always a little way behind, but not out of sight, not yet. Yes, it was certainly this school trip that started the tearing between Irva and me.
The class followed Mr Irt into the woods, Irva holding onto the back of my dress, not daring to look up. And then at last we saw it. There was a name for it, it was called, Mr Irt said, Schimakin. In we went, treading carefully, with handkerchiefs held over our faces (but that would not prevent our snot from coming out in shocking black streaks for days afterwards). What a sombre, wordless school group ours was. Forbidden to enter the angled houses lest they collapse with us inside, we looked in through tilted windows to dark rooms where we imagined we saw something move. Schimakin, with its rusting cars and bicycles, even made some of the class cry.
It was a town without any people in it.
Irva cheered up a little.
OPTIONAL EXCURSION 1. A DAY TRIP TO HELL. Many people from our country will say that there is nowhere called Schimakin, or that Schimakin did exist once but has long since vanished and that no one is quite sure where in our country it was ever actually supposed to be. Many people, they will tell you, have spent their lives looking for Schimakin, and many have been killed in that search, disappearing into the night and leaving no message behind to explain where they have gone. Such are the rumours that surround this abandoned town. Schimakin is absent from our maps, our cartographers have agreed that such an unhappy place should never be allowed to exist. But Schimakin, the Pompeii of our country, does exist, directions can even be provided. Take a bus from the principal bus station, opposite Central Train Station on Terminus Road, heading in the direction of the town of Krilna. En route to Krilna the bus will stop at the village of Ugrick, from Ugrick you must walk in a westerly direction across fields, and, after four kilometres, and behind thick woods, the lost town of Schimakin will be found. No roads lead to that place—they have all been removed, ploughed up, scrubbed clean away. In almost every country there are those wondrous and rare spots titled Places of Natural Beauty, places constantly photographed and made into postcards and exhibited on the carousel stands in newsagents’ kiosks nationwide. But there are other, perhaps equally wondrous and hopefully equally rare, spots which exist to compensate,