Alva and Irva by Edward Carey

Author:Edward Carey
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fantasy
ISBN: 9780679312338
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2003-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

OPTIONAL EXCURSION 2. ENTRALLA ZOO. A third of our city’s largest park, Ventis Park (trolley buses 7, 9, 14), is taken up with the City Zoo. If we lack human visitors from foreign countries we can at least boast animals from numerous foreign locations, but what sad faces they have, trudging dolefully around their limited homes. They can push their heads against bars and look across the way to see other animals, staring back at them from their cages, mirroring their own unhappy looks. Outside each of their cages are plastic signs with maps of the world on them, with a little patch of the world shaded red to indicate the region where each species originated. Elephants from Burma. Rhinos from Sumatra. Pigmy hippopotami from Liberia and Sierra Leone. Whale-headed storks from the swamps of East Africa. Giant anteaters from South Africa. Hamadryas baboons from Southern Arabia. Okapi from the Congo. Giraffes from the Sahara. Orangutans from Southeast Asia. A solitary, retiring aye-aye from Madagascar. They are all here, all these and many more.

What noises they should make: sounds from all the corners of the world. But these animals, for the most part, have grown silent, have forgotten themselves, with their food provided and with their enemies if not out of sight then at least cages away, they spend their days dozing in the shade, sometimes whisking away a fly or two that they imagine should be hovering somewhere about them, happy to ignore the children when they command them to come out of their huts to perform. Sometimes, it is possible to wander our zoo and barely see a single animal, and believe the zoo to be entirely deserted, but they are still there, the pot-bellied inhabitants are merely sleeping again, out of sight, dreaming perhaps of distant lands. So, to keep up the numbers of visitors, the zookeepers—every hour or so—encourage the beasts out of their stupor by lobbing food over the bars, or by putting children on top of Mongolian wild asses or Arabian dromedaries, or by bathing the elephants with brooms and hoses while the public look on in amazement at those great animals sitting on their huge backsides, resembling vast, naked old men with nose defects. It was here that Alva came and, walking from cage to cage, longed to break the locks, to set the animals free and to follow them all the way to their distant homes.

IRVA, SO GRANDFATHER and Mother had decided, was not quite ready for work, she should be left a while longer to recover, but I was given a post office uniform, and I wore it proudly. And this metamorphosis in blue fitted me like a perfectly tailored membrane, a second skin, as intricately mine as my own fingerprints. It was to be not only my profession but my personality. The post office uniform was a thing stronger than me, and it made me stronger, because the post office uniform was a thing of great certainty, it represented conviction and confidence.

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