Alva and Irva - Edward Carey [88]
ON THE USEFULNESS OF PLASTICINE BUILDINGS 3: SEARCHING. Even now I cannot regard the third and final exhibit in Gallery 24 without upset, for it is upsetting let there be no doubt about that. It is a city that can only conjure negative feelings. It is an evil, mean, limited place. If this city were to have inhabitants, they would surely one and all be shifty, suspicious people filled with disquiet and malevolence. They would range from petty thieves to habitual murderers. If there were any children there, they would be secretive and awkward, they would have imaginary friends who would constantly get the better of them. It is a city composed of hurt and self-neglect. On a first sighting you may assume that I am a man subject to gross exaggerations, for it will likely seem to you that there is nothing particularly upsetting about this model. It is set out, plausibly enough, like many another city; it has patterns of streets, squares, boulevards and parks—it is in fact based upon the city of Entralla. But as your studying becomes more thorough, you will see that this entire city consists only of one building, endlessly repeated. On this city’s version of Cathedral Square there is no cathedral, but only, once again, that same house, always the same size no matter what building it has usurped, and in the place of the bell tower and baptistery again you see that same house. On the top of this city’s Prospect Hill there is no Lubatkin’s Tower but only that same house. That same house in every road, street, square. You may initially have thought this was a curious city, amusing possibly, but you’ll soon find the repetition makes you nervous, you demand that something be different, but it never is, you see, not there. It is that same note played over and over again, the same note as you look through those streets rising in volume, until it fails to amuse you, it nauseates you, it disgusts you. In an effort to make your thoughts consider something new, you perhaps begin to wonder why this city was built, you begin to think of the person who built it. You see her now, all alone, day after day, constructing the same house over and over again. How long, you wonder now, did it take to construct? Eight months. Eight whole months with nothing but that same house day after day, week after week, month after month. Her dreams, you suppose, and you suppose correctly, must have been visited by that same house, by multitudes, armies, empires of that same house, with nothing to disturb it, to break the distressing monotony of that awful sameness, because as she runs in her nightdress in her nightmares down ill lit streets, she would come across in her horrifying trauma a vast and endless maze consisting solely of that same house.
AFTER THERE were hundreds of 27 Veber Streets (each less accurate than the first) to be found all over the house; after she’d completed her mock-city; after we couldn’t move for 27 Veber Streets, a new and final stage came over Irva. She started building tiny cubes, endless lines of cubes perfectly formed, all the same size.
‘What is it, Irva? What are you trying to tell us?’ But by then she had stopped speaking. She just pointed to those cubes, or would earnestly hold them up to us. Later she’d come in to see Jonas or me in our separate rooms, or together in his, and would give us a cube, ‘Thank you, Irva,’ we’d always say, ‘thank you very much.’ She’d smile, kiss us both, and leave the room. When those cubes had grown dust Irva would take them away again, she’d crush them and replace them with new ones. And it was only later, much later, that I understood that Irva’s cubes represented a single room. She was building again and again a single solitary room. This woman who built cities,