Alva and Irva - Edward Carey [71]
And what of the people who were inside the now burning Central Post Office that morning, with its twelve wooden counters which ignited so easily, what of them, these panicking post office workers, among them an elderly postmaster and a postwoman with a mole on her cheek, yes, what of them, with the main entrance door of the post office still locked, since it was several minutes before opening time, and so blocking off their main exit route, yes, yes, what of them? What of them? But concentrate, concentrate, I tell myself, it’s maps I’m talking of now, not people. So I leave the map in the Central Post Office, for it has become illegible, and take another. I remember, because I could never forget it, a certain three-dimensional plasticine map once situated all over the rooms of a Veber Street house.
The plasticine city was shaking too. And as the model shook, it began to spill buildings. The plasticine city was alive! Whole streets now were lifting off the trestle tables, mixing themselves up with other streets as if someone were trying to redesign our city, and as these places leapt from their ordered destinations some casualties were inevitable. Buildings fell to the floor, but once there, though now in strange bent and twisted shapes, would not be content but continued to dance still further and further away from the mass of our still jolting and jerking city, as if they were no longer satisfied with belonging to our city at all and had started journeying towards other distant cities that they believed might suit themselves a little better.
Consider Entralla now: Napoleon Street, the Paulus Boulevard, People Street, simply jiggling to their death. What a sight, unbearable even, or perhaps especially, when acted out by plasticine substitutes. Imagine it for a while, falling apart and then, after three or four minutes, and quite suddenly, the city was still once more.
ALL I HAVE SAID so far is part of the much bigger story of Entralla and its quake, but now I wish to talk not only about our city but also to show how little, commonplace people fit into the large sweep of history. History is not all mayors and sculptors and catastrophes. Sometimes it is long-distance lorry drivers called Jonas Lutt, and sometimes it is even twin sisters as well.
In Veber Street, in 27 Veber Street, in the attic that morning, Irva and I lay on the floor with plasticine buildings all about us. Our long legs bent at unaccustomed angles, Irva’s dress rumpled high about her waist, as if the earthquake had been trying to get inside her.
I wondered if somehow I had leant too hard onto one of the trestle tables and in so doing had set the city rushing away from itself. But then I thought, how was it that we were both on the floor? There was a portion of Entralla University on my lap—I briefly considered that it might be seeking comfort there. I saw two buildings from Pulvin Street leap from the table, bumpily cross the attic floor, hover over the edge of the open hatch and then disappear into the passageway below. And then I heard a great crashing. Surely, I thought, surely those two plasticine buildings from Pulvin Street tumbling down onto the landing would not make such a sound. Then I considered that the crashing must surely have come from way below, from down there in the kitchen, all that way away. I’ll have to go into the kitchen, I thought, I’ll have to travel all the way into the kitchen to see what it was that crashed. Perhaps Mother’s come back. But then I heard another crashing which sounded as if it was coming from outside, all the way