Alva and Irva - Edward Carey [70]
On Trinity Square, on the outskirts of Entralla, tall residential blocks, each fifteen storeys tall, collapsed into massive corpses, into piles of rubble of inconceivable largeness. People’s homes concertina-ed from fifteen floors into seven or even five. One block at the eastern end of the square was cut in half, so that half lay in jagged heaps on the square floor, while the other half remained standing. This bisected residence was reminiscent of dolls’ houses that open down the centre, revealing the rooms and their contents in two equal halves. In that remaining portion of a block, half a bedroom could be seen with half a bed, half a bathroom with a bath but no lavatory, half a sitting room with shelves and a television but no chairs to sit and watch it with, half kitchens with cookers but no refrigerators. Half apartments stretching all fifteen stories upwards, with only half families left inside them. Lovers had held hands as they lay asleep in their bed, the female on the left, the male on the right, but when the female awoke her hand was empty. If she moved over in her half-wakefulness hoping to find his warm body she too would have tumbled all the way down onto the broken floor of Trinity Square.
In Cathedral Square, on that particular morning the cathedral bell tower was ringing its bells excitedly as the cathedral began swaying dangerously from left to right and the great roof began to collapse. Earthquakes are unfathomable things, they will obliterate one building, yet leave its neighbour a little dizzy but otherwise unscathed. Above the cathedral, on top of Prospect Hill, Lubatkin’s Tower, seemingly indestructible, stood firm, for some keeping hope alive; for as long as the tower still stands, so long do we have a city called Entralla. And as the cathedral at the foot of Prospect Hill lost interest in all the statues in its niches and let them shatter in the square, as its pinnacles snapped in two, as it spat its masonry ornamentation away, as portions of its roof tumbled down slapping the floor of the nave, Lubatkin’s Tower was kept company by the bell tower which only wobbled a little, in sympathy perhaps. Within the cathedral itself the appalled archbishop looked out from his pulpit from which only moments before he had been delivering his sermon; as the dust cleared a little he saw rubble in front of him and a few dishevelled and dusty parishioners, rag dolls dispersed about his church.
Constantin Brack, our celebrated sculptor, in his studio on Jay Street, just beginning his work, saw various full-length marble people dancing across the floor towards him, never changing their expressions once. He opened his arms to receive them and they crowded in and crushed him to death.
Our mayor at that time, Rinas Holt, sitting at his breakfast table in the mayor’s residence, saw the heavy metal crest of our country lift up from the wall and strike him rudely on the head, spilling his brains into his bowl of cornflakes and turning the milk pink. What a time to lose a mayor, who would look after us now, now that we needed looking after more than ever? Ambras Cetts. Ambras Cetts was the man. Ambras Cetts had been spending the many years of our plasticine building climbing up the political ladder until, as the earthquake struck, he was assistant to the mayor of Entralla. Ambras Cetts, yes, he was the man for the job.
NOW IT IS TIME to consider a map, and, for the sake of familiarity, the map I wish to consider is the map on the wall of Grandfather’s office. I imagine that map of Grandfather’s shaking now also, I imagine it fluttering in the earthquake’s foul breath. And I see, with closed eyes, that as the map thrashes against its drawing pins that Grandfather’s office is going berserk, throwing stamps and envelopes and Grandfather everywhere. And now the electricity