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of the twins’ history). Well, here now is his forty-year-old daughter, shaking slightly, aggressive with loneliness and stooped over by it also, who is paying the price for the phenomenally successful life of her impeccable father
    Enjoy your coffee.

PART TWO
Alva & Irva

AN OVER-PROTECTIVE
MOTHER ONCE LIVED ON
VEBER STREET
    Residential Streets
    Taking trolley bus 5-heading out of the city, away from Cathedral and Market Squares-you will quickly find yourself entering a residential area of the city Do not be frightened. Here is where the real stories are kept, not in the larger, more imposing structures of Entralla’s centre, but rather inside its ordinary domestic dwellings. Certainly the guidebook to our city will not advise you to take trolley bus route 5, unless it is heading in the opposite direction, but that is one of many failings of that book. Take the stop at Pilias Street in sector eight of our city, from there it is a short stroll to Veber Street, where this chapter shall be focused.

    M OTHER HELD AT each breast an Alva or an Irva. While I struggled and wriggled with life, unable to lose the feeling of delight for movement, Irva kept very still. Only her eyes seemed to move, following Mother’s actions with the disapproving look of an ancient. I was easy to feed, clamping my mouth to Mother’s nipples and sucking with so ferocious an energy that Mother believed she could feel herself emptying out. But Irva had to be carefully encouraged; she kept turning her heavy head away from the nipples as if away from life, and often Mother had to feed her with a bottle, and often she was sick.
    T HIS IS HOW we looked, these were the gifts we were given: from Mother pale skin and dark hair; from Father big heads and weak hearts. Not much of an inheritance.
    Mother returned to her flat on Napoleon Street with two more little lives than she had left it and with one less big one. How the flat smelt of Father. From one window she could look out and see Napoleon Street down which Father had been escorted away from the post office towards the police buildings, already so pale, already with strange shooting pains in his arm. Whenever she looked out of the window, Mother saw Father being taken away again and again. In her mind she saw him, night and day, being escorted down the street, and, once out of sight, quickly reappearing again, still under escort, still crying the same tears. And no one ever came running to help him. Weak and dreamy Orphan Linas, Linas the Potent, our tall father, had miserably confessed to Ambras Cetts and his companions everything about letters from foreign countries and everything about an abandoned house on Foundry Lane with dangerous floorboards. What he had done was criminal, they told him. What he had done would not go unpunished. What he had done meant that he would have to accompany them immediately on an excursion to the police station. And suddenly Father knew that he wouldnever see Mother again, because here he was, flanked by men on either side, being walked out of the post office and up Napoleon Street, surely (of this he felt certain) on the way to his execution. He stood swaying in the police station, even though there was no breeze. The floor started rushing towards him. And everything went dark.
    ‘Linas Dapps: extinct of a weak heart’, the report states. He simply slumped forwards. A doctor’s note stapled to the report mentioned the words ‘Systole’, ‘Ventricle’ and ‘Atrium’ and concluded with the words ‘Mitral Insufficiency’.
    Mother realised that if she were to care properly for us, if she were to keep our baby hearts twitching, then she must find some place where the window offered a different view. So Mother left her home, where she had played briefly the role of wife, and entered a new one where she would perform as Mother. And for that she permitted Grandfather to help. Grandfather rented a house on Veber Street, in sector eight of Entralla, far away from