Alva and Irva - Edward Carey [47]
I was ordered to sleep in the next-door bedroom. Mother gathered up my things, one half of everything inside the room, an identical half, an exact half, and deposited it in the spare room. A stranger visiting our house that day could be forgiven, as the tour of our home progressed, for believing that he had seen the same room twice. Irva tried to keep back some of my objects by hiding them under the bed or in our old wardrobe or by clinging to them. Mother was ruthless. Mother vacuumed the room, and dusted thoroughly. And so Irva was left in her Irva territory, existing only of Irva. It was for the good, Mother told her, imitating Grandfather, when she wailed. I closed the door to my new bedroom, I sat on my bed. All this is mine, I thought, only mine, I shan’t allow anyone else inside. ‘This,’ I whispered, looking about me, ‘is private property.’ And I vowed I’d change and expand the contents of my little kingdom until it in no way resembled the contents of that Irva-land so close by. As I sat in my room that day I thought of August Hirkus in some equivalent room far away in Canada.
After Mother divided our property, and set us Berlin-like, in different worlds, Grandfather, as some kind of privileged ambassador, wandered throughout the house, not commenting on the great change, but noticing it profoundly. He tried to cheer things along with his onwards-onwardsness, but it never worked. And he could never bear to stay for very long. He tried to make light of the healing scab on my forehead, saying it was very helpful. Looking at the arrow pointing at the letter ‘N’, he would comment, ‘Alva Dapps, this way up’. Or sometimes he would call me ‘North’ and Irva ‘South’. But nobody even smiled and Mother opened the box of kitchen matches and began to snap one matchstick after another in half, so he soon got the message. So he soon shut up. So he soon went away again. But he would always leave by smiling at me and saying, ‘Alva, it’ll soon be September and then you’ll begin at the post office. In the meantime enjoy your holiday.’ But I never wanted that holiday, and when I told Grandfather I’d happily begin work immediately, he shook his head and told me I’d better wait. ‘Besides,’ he said, ‘by September that scar will be barely visible.’
In those days I was experiencing my new independence. As I grew so Irva faded. The north sign had confirmed how fundamentally different I was from her. And I did not wish the wound to go away. Irva began to wear a woollen hat to cover her forehead. I began to pin my hair back with a multitude of hairclips. Sometimes Irva would fold up sheets of loo paper and tape them with plasters to her forehead, but these were halfhearted efforts which fooled no one. When a scab was formed I would painfully reopen it in the privacy of the bathroom. I clung desperately to my new independence. And it was only after my fourth of fifth visit to the doctor, with an insistent and distressed mother in the lead and with myself in tow, that the doctor said the following comforting truth, ‘I don’t know what it is that you’re trying to do, young lady. If you’d left your scab to heal naturally there’d hardly be a mark on your forehead, but now, and because of your protracted vandalism, you are sure to have a scar there for the rest of your life. I hope you’re proud of yourself.’
Thank you, doctor. I was. And then I left my forehead to heal.
MEANWHILE, OUTSIDE of the listless house, 27 Veber Street, it was hot, hopeful, sexy, thirsty summer. And out I went, out into new days!
On Veber Street, on Sundays, I would always see the heavy man Jonas Lutt, the long-distance lorry driver who lived at no. 15, washing his car. I always looked out for Jonas’s T-shirts. Sometimes he would wear one which said, in German, ‘MUSEUM FÜR VOLKERKUNDE, HAMBURG’, or else, in Polish, ‘ZAMEK KROLEWSKI,