Alva and Irva - Edward Carey [79]
14LOST TREASURES OF ENTRALLA. THE CHEST OF DRAWERS OF JONAS LUTT. Jonas Lutt looked suspiciously at that chest of drawers so many times in the years following the earthquake, waiting for the malignant force to set it moving again, as if the fate of the city could be determined by the activity of a single bedroom object. Sometimes, waking after bad dreams, he would lurch for the bedside light to check whether the chest had begun to live again. It watched him sleeping on so many nights with an attitude quite out of keeping with objects of domestic usage. About ten years after the earthquake, he woke up once again to stare at the chest but this time he had had enough. He heaved the thing out of the bedroom and into the passage. The next morning he pulled out its drawers. He took it drawer by drawer and then finally its empty cage into the street and dismantled it with an axe, happily chopping the thing to splinters. And then he burnt it. And as he burnt it he considered that he was by this act ridding Entralla of any future calamities.
INTERLUDE 3
Supper
Tectonic House, Television Tower, Le Grand Lubatkin
Tectonic House, Napoleon Street 112.
Open 12:00-23:30, tel. 316 34 26;
Television Tower Restaurant, Bank Street 5–7.
Open 12:00-23:00, tel. 316 66 66;
Le Grand Lubatkin, Pijus Street 2.
Open 20:00–24:00, tel. 316 21 23.
For the final interlude of this tour our distinguished visitors have been given the opportunity to decide for themselves. There are many restaurants throughout Entralla, some catering to specific world cuisines for those foreign visitors of ours whose stomachs, unlike the rest of their bodies, are perhaps not prepared to travel. We have restaurants serving Italian, Thai, American, Chinese, Spanish, Polish, Japanese and Indian dishes, so that even in Entralla foreign stomachs of those nationalities may be allowed to feel at home. However, I would like to recommend three restaurants which range across the spectrum of pricing from the extremely cheap to the monstrously expensive. These recommendations may of course be ignored, but all three of these eateries have been happy to offer a 10 per cent reduction for those people seen clutching, the perhaps by now slightly dog-eared, Alva & Irva: The Twins Who Saved a City. But whichever restaurant is chosen, or perhaps none at all-in which case there are various supermarkets for the self-caterer-I would like to take this opportunity to urge our visitors to enjoy a digestif or a final coffee at Café Louis on Market Square. It is the perfect place to end twenty-four hours in Entralla.
TECTONIC HOUSE, with its glass brick roof (repaired), used to be an indoor flower market, but the flowers, lacking water and buyers, faded and died during the earthquake period. The International Red Cross, people trained in misery, set up one of their many centres here. In this building names of the deceased were published, and also photographs of the nameless dead. Soon people arriving in their sorry states would be provided with water and coffee and food also, until, over time, the building became the cheap restaurant it is today and was renamed Tectonic House.
The walls of the ground-floor rooms of Tectonic House are decorated with a vast list of names, some fifteen thousand, skilfully painted in black, of those people who lost their lives in the earthquake. A few names, of the more influential citizens, are painted in red—for example, Rinas Holt, our former mayor; Constantin Brack, the famous sculptor; and Mircas Grett, postmaster general. Among this list of names in the less exceptional black it is possible to pick