Alva and Irva - Edward Carey [90]
I returned to Entralla some twelve years ago, to a very different Entralla than I had known in my youth. At times I was hard-pressed to recognise it at all. Fortunately the old tower remains; some things, after all, do not change. But all the same this was home, I had come home. If indeed there was a home anywhere for me now.
In Canada, years ago, I had rowed and lost touch with my brother. I was amazed how little time it can take to lose a family. For a long while I never thought of home, sometimes though I’d catch myself wondering about Alva, about whether she thought of me, about whether she was perhaps still waiting for me, spending lonely afternoons looking at the ceiling of Entralla’s Central Train Station. Then, after years of ignoring my past, more and more often, for no particular reason and quite involuntarily, I took to sitting on my own in cafés mumbling to myself, trying to recall my own language. But so much I had forgotten. I began to write endless little notes of only a few sentences, of instances of my childhood that I was able still to recall, and once I had a few of those memories on paper many more came rushing back to me, and with those memories how I felt I had rediscovered my home, I could feel it again. And with each memory returned I felt more myself. I spent more and more time alone, remembering. In the end it seemed increasingly obvious to me that I must in fact return home. I told people at work that I’d be gone a week, ten days perhaps, that was twelve years ago.
I shall not leave Entralla again.
For a month I lived in the International World Hotel until finally I had the courage to admit to myself that I was not going back. Then I rented a small apartment near my mother’s old house on Dismas Street. My mother had died six years before and I’d never known, I’d never felt that she had died, I’ve no idea what I was doing the moment of her death. The pain I now feel because of her death is so surprising to me because of its ferocity. I wake up calling for her. A grown man of fifty so terrified of the dark, calling for his mother! I’ve become one more of those sombre faces in the crowds, full of personal and obscure sadness. My sister married, she has two children, I look at them, I look at my niece and nephew, I touch them, I think: what an achievement. It is not, after all, so easy to lose a family.
I bore people with unspectacular memories of my distant places, I begin my sentences with ‘That reminds me of when I was living in … Of course in such and such a place things are very different …Did I tell you about my journey to…’
To begin with I just walked Entralla. I saw the cathedral, still then with its temporary roof of tin, I walked the Paulus Boulevard and People Street and could not recognise them. I saw Bread Square, site of my father’s death but also of my childhood, I walked and I tried to remember. I had hoped that one day on these visits I would come across Alva or her sister. I allowed myself to imagine Alva asking to marry me, I felt I could picture the scene so accurately. But I did not make any true attempt to find her then. When I did, after nearly two months and longing for company, I searched the telephone book; there were many hundreds of Dapps listed there of course. I rang any with the initial D for Dallia and though I spoke to several Dallia Dapps none was the mother of my friends. Then I rang any A. Dapps and any I. Dapps, again with the same result. I could not find them anywhere. I returned to Veber Street to discover their house boarded up, leaning at a dangerous angle. There are still many houses like this about the outer streets of Entralla, waiting to be tugged down or rebuilt, a fraction alive but mostly dead. Every now and then, I hear reports on the radio of adventurous children who climb inside them, and then these houses shut like a trap, they collapse, as if they’d been waiting for those children all along.
I looked at the