Alva and Irva - Edward Carey [60]
Jonas never stayed very long, he’d sit by the progressing city up in the attic and list numbers of motorways. Irva ignored him, she continued working away, those names meant nothing to her. On about the third Sunday, when I remember Jonas was wearing a T-shirt which said ‘ANNE FRANKHUIS, AMSTERDAM’, he announced, ‘When visiting friends it is generally understood that you arrive with several bottles of beer or even a single bottle of wine, when visiting girlfriends it is generally understood that you arrive holding a bunch of delicately perfumed flowers, when you visit Alva and Irva Dapps it must be understood that you come bearing plasticine.’ And then he held out a block of red plasticine, which Irva refused to build with.
Jonas never had any problems in telling us one from the other, he joked that I was the twin in colour, and that Irva was the twin in black and white, as if Irva’s withdrawal from the world had included a withdrawal from colour.
Sometimes when Jonas came we wouldn’t have time for his magnificent travelling stories, sometimes they’d upset Irva. She was frightened that I might be tempted away. On those occasions, Mother would make him tea or coffee and they’d sit together for hours in the kitchen, Mother patiently listening to Jonas’s international lists.
IRVA BUILT the Financial District of Entralla, and the Television Tower, which immediately dominated the plasticine Entrallan skyline. From the top of the Television Tower, where there is a revolving restaurant that allows you to view all three hundred and sixty degrees of Entralla as you eat, and which I visited as I was making notes on the Financial District, I saw how far our model was from completion. I muttered to myself and to all the vastness of the city, ‘It is a truth: Entralla, whether of stone or plasticine, was not built in a day.’ And still Irva seemed so far from ready to leave. She happily modelled buildings but did she really understand that these buildings actually existed just a little distance from where she was working away?
Now as I studied Entralla everyday, as I saw Irva carefully modelling it, I felt I was understanding our city for the first time. The more Irva built the more I understood, the more it became our home. The city was reduced to combinations of spheres, oblongs, squares and cylinders, such limited choices. Irva was endlessly cutting these shapes, the angles of people’s lives. Sometimes as she worked crouched over with her sharp knives and disobedient plasticine she’d prick her finger and a little blood would fall down onto a street.
With the buildings so reduced how much sympathy we had for the people of Entralla now. The smallness sometimes even made us cry: buildings no bigger than a fingernail; lives, then, smaller still. Irva cut out windows in plasticine walls, for without windows how could the people look in or out. She carved out doors too, all the doorways of Entralla. We feared for our city, the slightest jog of the trestle tables would set the buildings trembling, disturbing our hearts. We would often climb the attic stairs during the night to check that it was safe, we dreamt troubled nights of squashed buildings. We taped over the windows in the attic with black bin liners to stop dust and to keep out the sun which overheated our plasticine. We inspected the attic ceiling weekly, looking for hairline cracks, we added braces to the tables’ legs. Our profoundest instinct in those days: to protect.
SOMETIMES THE old yearning would come back to me and with it, impatience. On those days I would cautiously visit the travel agencies again, always, during the city’s lunch breaks, when the agencies were at their busiest. One afternoon I stole something from a display in an agency shop front. It fitted into my uniform pocket easily enough, I felt it belonged there, it seemed happy enough, and then I rushed out of the shop and ran whooping with delight through those so familiar streets. The object that I stole was a green plastic, fifteen-centimetre-tall souvenir