Alva and Irva - Edward Carey [85]
SO THE DUST sheets of my days were pulled away, Irva wound me up with encouragement and her new-found confidence, she shuffled me unsteadily back to plasticine construction. We slotted the city together. No one else was permitted to help. It took us nearly two weeks. Their calculations had been faulty, they had to keep extending the large table (which was really several large tables bolted together) they had built entirely for our city—that table which we slept under in army sleeping bags at night. ‘More?’ they kept asking us. ‘Yes, more,’ we’d say, ‘More. More.’
To see it in its entirety! Laid out in its completeness! All plasticine Entralla! Each chipboard square by chipboard square, slowly expanding. Only then did we truly understood the enormity of our work, only then could we understand the size of Entralla, the weight of it. And when the official people came to see it they gasped. Had we really done all this by ourselves, we had of course, no one else, don’t you believe us? ‘But why?’ they asked, ‘Why had we?’ I told them, with shrugs, ‘Maybe because we were lonely.’ And we had to admit that it was incomplete. And that it was impossible to finish now of course.
Then we met Ambras Cetts, who was the man, unintentionally perhaps, who had killed our father. I was going to tell him, but instead we both just sat, smiling, nervous. This was our mayor, our mayor was talking to us, to Irva and to me! ‘Excellent work,’ he told us. ‘Very useful,’ he said. ‘True patriots,’ he said. ‘Goodbye,’ he said.
We never once replied to any of his comments.
WE WERE TO become a story for the digestion of the Entrallan populace. We were, with our plasticine city, to be pushed forward as an example of the Entrallan spirit. We were to be made a fuss of. They took photographs of us standing near the city, and on one occasion Ambras Cetts came to stand in between us and smiled his smile which made us forgive him almost instantly, even for Father’s death. (We’re taller than Ambras Cetts, we measured him, one hundred and seventy-two centimetres, how small he looked in those photographs with Irva and me either side of him.) They published articles about us. ‘ALVA AND IRVA, TRUE CITIZENS OF ENTRALLA’. One said, ‘PLASTICINE TWINS SAVE CITY’. ‘How ridiculous!’ we cackled, ‘Some people will probably think we’re made of plasticine!’ They wrote how useful our work was in recovering Entralla. They made up strange stories about how each and every building was accurately measured, about how Grandfather and Mother had helped us, about how Father had died trying to save people in an old earthquake years back. One article even said: ‘Michelangelo with his marble, Rembrandt with his oils, Alva and Irva with their plasticine.’ They made huge posters which they stuck on giant billboards. Between a man on his horse in a cowboy hat advertising cigarettes and a nearly naked woman with a great waterfall of blonde hair standing in a sunflower field advertising shampoo, could be found Alva and Irva advertising hope. With the caption: ‘IF THEY CAN BUILD THE CITY, SO CAN WE’. The North scars on our foreheads, we noticed, had been airbrushed out.
THERE WAS much talk in those days, and many arguments, about whether the actual city should be carefully reconstructed as it once was or whether the past should be forgotten and a new fresher city be made in its place. Mostly, people wanted the old Entralla back, and the designs put forward which gave the damaged parts of the city exact gridded streets with exact squares were quietly put aside. Many new buildings were to be built of course but mostly in the outer circles of Entralla and certainly never in the old town, which was to be carefully rebuilt in its former beauty (except for the Paulus Boulevard; Paulus suffered most of all, ancient, sophisticated buildings would in the future look onto duplicate blocks).