Alva and Irva - Edward Carey [66]
IT IS SIMPLY a fact that some people long to travel the entire world, and do not flinch from nights in wild forests or from the heat of the desert or from the anger of a tempest. It is simply a fact that some men long to climb the loftiest of mountains, others to explore the harshness of Antarctica, others still to circumnavigate the world in hot-air balloons. Why do they do it? For the challenge, we are expected to believe. And the newspapers and the journalists will not shut up about these people. But there are other, more modest people, whom for the most part the journalists avoid, who are frightened to step out into a street. It is a fact that it is too challenging for them. They cannot do it. This latter group of people, who almost always exist in solitude, are so panicked by the world that they close themselves up inside houses, inside rooms, and never leave again. The longer they stay inside the harder it is for them to peer out; they may be brave enough at first to touch door handles but very soon it will be impossible for them to turn them.
SUFFICIENT PLASTICINE construction has now been accomplished for me to arrive at a certain significant date: 15 July. To be precise, to arrive at the eve of Irva’s excursion, on the day before she’d leave 27 Veber Street. On this day then, this unhappy day, heir to such misery, on this day perhaps six weeks before the plasticine city would have been completed, on this day, this day when I came home, predictably enough, from Outer Entralla, on this day, here goes then, on this day I found Mother had been cleaning the house in preparation for Jonas Lutt who was coming to supper.
Many of the boxes were in different places.
In different orders.
One had even been turned upside down.
SHE APOLOGISED of course, she kept on apologising. But we shrieked at her. And we opened the box which had been turned upside down and thrust the dented plasticine streets in front of Mother’s face. And we crushed those dented buildings in front of her, pounded them with our fists in our exasperation, me strongly, Irva weakly, until Mother began weeping and even ran out of our house and up to Jonas’s. And then a few hours later, after we had calmed a little and were slowly reordering our work, Jonas and Mother came in and Jonas started to tell us that we had been wrong to speak to Mother like that and we nearly turned savage with anger, and I said, ‘Get him out, this is not his house, what’s he doing in here?’ And Jonas said we were being cruel and selfish. ‘Cruel and selfish?’ I said, and showed him the deformed and hunchbacked, misshapen plasticine streets of Entralla. But he didn’t understand, he didn’t understand at all. ‘It’s only plasticine,’ he said. ‘Wrong!’ we yelled. And then I picked up Father’s stool and asked Mother, ‘What’s this?’ And she said, ‘You know very well it’s your father’s stool, don’t play games.’ And then Irva pointed at Jonas and said, ‘What’s that? That’s not our father, what’s he doing in our home?’ And Jonas said he’d come back later and Irva yelled, she actually yelled, ‘Come back never!’ Mother began to cry again, and then Jonas took her by the hand and out of the kitchen and even out of 27 Veber Street. ‘Come on, Dallia,’ he said, ‘come home with me. You shouldn’t stay here in this place, Dallia, with these creatures, come away.’ Dallia? we thought for a moment,