Alva and Irva - Edward Carey [76]
And then he just stood. He stood still from a distance. Just watching, looking at the burning post office. Expressionless.
ON I TOILED, chipboard square after chipboard square, placing them gently into Irva’s waiting hands as soon as I was out in the street again. And with each new square appearing Irva began to smile more and more. And the smile grew into a quiet laugh and the laugh grew into a giggling. And now each time I arrived with a new square there was Irva, giggling away, delighted at each new saved fraction of her city. And I too began laughing with her, together we, in hysterics now, were unable to stop ourselves from cackling in our plasticine triumph, as more and more of the city was safe.
Irva placed each part of the rescued centre of our city on the top of boxes until the trestle tables were free to be moved. The legs of the tables were easy, but the table surfaces had to be slid down the stairs and splinters cut into my fingers. But still I laughed, we laughed, we couldn’t stop ourselves.
Once the tables were erected again, Irva began to put the puzzle of Entralla together.
JONAS LUTT WOULD stop that afternoon and help anyone who asked for it, he even attended to those who did not call for him or even perhaps did not really require his attentions. He made himself useful, pulling away small boulders of masonry, alerting other men to places his strength could not reach alone. He attempted to comfort the tearful, he thought about nothing other than those poor scarecrow people around him. He gave a little boy his jacket and would perhaps have undressed himself entirely if that would have been of use. He helped other men tugging out the heavy, swollen corpse of a fat man who had died crushed in his bath. He saw a man dancing a waltz with the body of his dead daughter, calling out, ‘I’ve found my daughter! I’ve found my daughter!’ He saw rubble both sides of a street, no houses left at all, and in between a stilled and lonely trolley bus.
And it was only later, when he saw an elderly couple holding tight to each other that he began to shake. Delayed reaction, that’s what it was. And it was only then that he remembered what he had seen when the flames of the Central Post Office had finally been extinguished.
WE SPENT THE entire day, quietly working on, our joyful cackling ignited again by the slightest thing, recovering the city of Entralla from its trauma. About us people made such noise it started our hands shaking, and we had to keep our hands steady then, it was most important. And then finally with the buildings back in the correct places, we allowed ourselves a little rest, while back inside our home Mother’s room had slouched into the kitchen, and the whole house was lifting slowly up from the street, threatening to fall backwards. We’d have to jump up a little to reach our entrance step. But we didn’t care then, not then, by then it was finished: a whole city in a street. How we laughed.
JONAS LUTT, SEEING that elderly couple holding fast to each other, suddenly remembered that he had been one of the first to enter the Central Post Office on Napoleon Street. And suddenly he was able to remember quite clearly what it was that he had seen. Postman Kurt Laudus, who had once been a possible marriage candidate for Mother, who was a friend of mine from Café Louis, was buried under a fraction of the ceiling, but some of him was still visible, his face, for example, which was already bruised, even before the earthquake had happened, smashed by Louis in a jealous fit. Aged Grandfather, the postmaster, lay still and rigid in his office, with a strange grimace on his face, with his mouth