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By Root 832 0

bravery. The quake had tried to teach us that we had little control over ourselves, that we were insignificant and flimsy; but some Entrallans rebelled from that lesson. In those days it was possible to see people wandering about the city suddenly stop dead with a vast smirk on their face, stick out their tongues or raise their fingers in a salute of derision and yell (either down at the ground or up at the sky, depending on whether they were religious or not), filled with this new boldness: ‘Give that to your hunchback daughter!’8 And afterwards they might run off to murder procrastination. Yes, now timid people, who without the earthquake might ever have remained so, proclaimed love to shocked friends or neighbours or burst into their offices and, filled with a glowing inspiration that sped them onwards, became great achievers—freed from their chains of shyness. There was a great sense of doing in the city then; the prostitutes in the Sex District were exhausted; people rushed about visiting friends and family, ending feuds that would otherwise have been exhausted only by funerals; people ate with a voracity that astonished restaurant owners; people danced with a liberation that their bodies had never known before, and perhaps most astonishing of all, when people passed each other in the streets they would often stop and say, ‘Good morning,’ or, ‘How are you?’ (even though they may never have met the person before) or, ‘What a lovely day’ (even though it might have been raining). I was also caught up in this great tsunami of energetic doing and thinking, this need for communication, and I began to sit upright in class.

BEFORE WE HAD always had the junior history teacher. Now, for the first time, old and creased Mr Rinas Riddin, a man who seemed to have lived all history, stepped into our class. This is what he said to us that first morning of his tutelage: ‘In order not to slumber in cultural provincialism or spiritual sterility, we are obliged to know everything that happens and everything that has happened in the four corners of the globe.’

We were to discover the world, Mr Riddin proclaimed, and, tugging the class away from our previous history lessons in which our country held a monopoly, the adventure began. We went to war, armed with sharpened pencils and leaking fountain pens. On wintry afternoons, with classroom strip lighting defying the dark outside, we visited Julius Caesar. And in a lighter classroom, as spring began, we watched the Roman Empire burn. Mr Riddin spun the globe on his desk and we visited those places where his index finger, halting the world’s rotation, commanded our imaginations. We went to China, to Japan, to Turkey, to Russia, to France, to Britain, to America even.

AFTER MR RIDDIN had begun to introduce us to the world, with my insistence, Irva and I would frequently visit the Central Library on People Street. Irva didn’t like me studying foreign places, she was jealous of them. But, never bearing to leave me alone, she sat beside me, learning everything I learnt, and somehow, because Irva was with me there, those faraway lands began to lose something of their possibilities. It was as if Irva with her sulky concentration was attempting to turn every city in the world into just another Entralla, to make Paris and Marrakesh and Johannesburg yet more Entrallas only with different names.

We would examine varieties of maps, in the great map room of the library. We’d regard maps of distant cities and I’d wonder to Irva, whispering out those destinations in the hope that saying them would somehow reveal them, ‘What goes on in Franz-Joseph Strasse in München, Deutschland?’ or ‘Who lives in Vytauto Gatve, Vilnius, Lietuva?’ or ‘What’s it like in Via Capo Palimuro in Milano, Italia?’ There were maps of modern cities which gave us only hints of real places, maps of cities in ruins—London after its fire of 1666, San Francisco after its 1906 earthquake, Dresden after the 1945 bombing. There were maps of the world ancient and modern, strange early maps in which the initial cartographers had drawn almost