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By Root 835 0

street flopped over walls, their shirts and skirts gently moved by the wind. But sometimes it wasn’t whole stilled people whom they saw in our street, sometimes it was little bits of people, often not recognisable as the bits of people until they looked harder: a hand peeping out of rubble, with an eternity ring still on its finger, or a buried leg with a perfectly usable shoe at its end. And they saw, standing on the doorstep at one end of this street of ours, this street which we have lived in for so long, this street which is our home in the world, they saw twin women. One of them in a post office uniform, the other in a dress with long greasy hair and a face so white it looked as if it had been painted on. Strange, they thought on this strangest of days, we had only seen one twin for such a long time now that we presumed the other one must have died.

NOW FROM our doorstep vantage point we saw someone we instantly recognised: Jonas Lutt. The presence of Jonas Lutt was yet another reminder that earthquakes certainly do not only concern sculptors and mayors, collapsing apartment blocks and female twins, sometimes they are even about our street, and sometimes they are even about long-distance lorry drivers.

Irva looked at me briefly in terror and rushed back inside our dying home.

JONAS LUTT, in 12 Veber Street, alone in his bedroom—which our own mother had recently quietly tip-toed away from that morning to journey to her work at the Central Post Office—had been woken by the earthquake. His initial earthquake experience was not one of horror but of mild amusement. He was woken by a terrific banging. As he opened his eyes, he saw that somehow his chest of drawers was alive. Jonas watched it as the quake bounced him up and down naked upon his bed. The chest of drawers, which was a Lutt family heirloom and was an expensive piece of genuine Rococo furniture, originating in France, and built in the year 1720 (approximately), moved around the bedroom, turning on itself, spinning on a single corner, bowing to Jonas, its drawers moving in and out as if some invisible force were desperately searching for a piece of its clothing, slamming the drawers shut, and then pulling them open again. Just as the thing decided to march straight towards him, the rumbling halted and, as if suddenly shocked, it collapsed, falling with a crash onto its back, its little legs quite still again.14

As Jonas leapt out of bed he noticed that great gashes had appeared on his bedroom walls and as he stood at his window he heard the crashing begin all about the city. And then in a panic he remembered our mother and called out our mother’s name, ‘Dallia, Dallia!’

And I watched him that morning, briefly, from our doorstep, charge up the place that used to be called Veber Street, and then I looked away and hurried inside our home after Irva.

OUR HOME mumbled and whined but still, for the moment, kept upright. Irva was inside, in the listing attic, by the city, returning the buildings to their correct places, trying to make everything right again.

The city of Entralla was missing a few of its key monuments, and certainly in many places it had been jumbled about, but it was mostly still there, still noticeably its triumphant self, still an undoubted miracle: our plasticine city. And Irva would not leave it. She turned her back to me and continued her work. No. 27 Veber Street muttered and sang to her, as it foundered. She wouldn’t come out, we’d made a promise she kept repeating, she couldn’t leave the city, who’d look after it if she didn’t. I tried to force her out, but she kicked now and bit and wouldn’t be persuaded. I explained the terrible danger, but all she would consider was her plasticine city, which she could not, she implored, could not abandon.

I ran back out into Veber Street, I begged our neighbours to help, to drag my sister from our home, but they looked away. ‘She’s all right,’ they said, they had seen her just a moment ago. They were more concerned with people they hadn’t seen since the night before. ‘Don’t bother us now.’

What could