Babel, page 15
Only now – perhaps because of the wine, or perhaps it had all been building up for so long that things were past the tipping point – he felt he wanted to scream. Cry. Kick the wall. Anything, if only to make his father look him in the face.
‘Oh, Robin.’ Professor Lovell glanced up. ‘Tell Mrs Piper we’d like some coffees before you go, will you?’
Robin grabbed his coat and left the room.
He did not turn from High Street onto Magpie Lane.
Instead he went further and passed into the grounds of Merton College. At night, the gardens were twisted and eerie; black branches reached like fingers from behind a bolted iron gate. Robin fiddled uselessly with the lock, then hauled himself panting over a narrow gap between the spikes. He wandered a few feet into the garden before realizing he did not know what a birch looked like.
He stepped back and glanced around, feeling rather foolish. Then a patch of white caught his eye – a pale tree, surrounded by a cluster of mulberry bushes, trimmed to curl slightly upwards as if in adulation. A knob protruded from the white tree’s trunk; in the moonlight, it looked like a bald head. A crystal ball.
As good a guess as any, Robin thought.
He thought of his brother in his flapping raven’s cloak, brushing his fingers over this pale wood by moonlight. Griffin did love his theatrics.
He wondered at the hot coil in his chest. The long, sobering walk had not dimmed his anger. He still felt ready to scream. Had dinner with his father infuriated him so? Was this the righteous indignation that Griffin spoke of? But what he felt was not as simple as revolutionary flame. What he felt in his heart was not conviction so much as doubt, resentment, and a deep confusion.
He hated this place. He loved it. He resented how it treated him. He still wanted to be a part of it – because it felt so good to be a part of it, to speak to its professors as an intellectual equal, to be in on the great game.
One nasty thought crept into his mind – It’s because you’re a wounded little boy, and you wish they had paid you more attention – but he pushed this away. Surely he could not be so petty; surely he was not merely lashing out at his father because he felt dismissed.
He had seen and heard enough. He knew what Babel was at its roots, and he knew enough to trust his gut.
He ran his finger over the wood. His nails would not do. A knife would have been ideal, but he’d never carried one. At last, he pulled a fountain pen from his pocket and pressed the tip into the knob. The wood gave purchase. He scratched hard several times to make the cross visible – his fingers ached, and the nib was irreversibly ruined – but at last he left his mark.
Chapter Seven
Quot linguas quis callet, tot homines valet.
The more languages you speak, the more men you are worth.
CHARLES V
The following Monday, Robin returned to his room after class to find a slip of paper wedged under his windowsill. He snatched it up. Heart hammering, he shut his door and sat down on the floor, squinting at Griffin’s cramped handwriting.
The note was in Chinese. Robin read it twice, then backwards, then forwards again, perplexed. Griffin seemed to have strung together characters utterly at random and the sentences did not make sense – no, they could not even be described as sentences, for although there was punctuation, the characters were arranged without care for grammar or syntax. This was a cipher, surely, but Griffin had not given Robin a key, and Robin could think of no literary allusions or subtle hints Griffin might have dropped to help him decode this nonsense.
At last he realized he was going about it all wrong. This was not Chinese. Griffin had merely used Chinese characters to convey words in a language Robin suspected was English. He ripped a sheet of paper from his diary, placed it next to Griffin’s note, and wrote out the romanization of each character. Some of the words took guesswork, since romanized Chinese words had very different spelling patterns to English words, but in the end, through working out several common change patterns – tè always meant ‘the’, ü was oo – Robin broke the code.
The next rainy night. Open the door at precisely midnight, wait inside the foyer, then walk back out at five past. Speak to no one. Go straight home after.
Do not deviate from my instructions. Memorize, then burn.
Curt, direct, and minimally informative – just like Griffin. It rained constantly at Oxford. The next rainy night could be tomorrow.
Robin read the note again and again until he’d committed the details to memory, then tossed both the original and his decryption into the fireplace, watching intently until every scrap had shrivelled to ash.
On Wednesday, it poured. It had been misty all afternoon, and Robin had watched the darkening sky with accumulating dread. When he left Professor Chakravarti’s office at six, a soft drizzle was slowly turning the pavement grey. By the time he reached Magpie Lane, the rain had thickened to a steady patter.
He locked himself in his room, put his assigned Latin readings on his desk, and tried to at least stare at them until the hour came.
By half past eleven, the rain had announced its permanence. It was the kind of rain that sounded cold; even in the absence of vicious winds, snow, or hail, the very pattering against cobblestones felt like cubes of ice hammering against one’s skin. Robin saw now the reasoning behind Griffin’s instructions – on a night like this, you couldn’t see more than a few feet past your own nose, and even if you could, you wouldn’t care to look. Rain like this made you walk with your head down, shoulders hunched, indifferent to the world until you got to somewhere warm.
At a quarter to midnight, Robin threw on a coat and stepped into the hallway.
‘Where are you going?’
He froze. He’d thought Ramy was asleep.
‘Forgot something in the stacks,’ he whispered.
Ramy cocked his head. ‘Again?’
‘I suppose it’s our curse,’ Robin whispered, trying to keep his expression blank.
‘It’s pouring. Go and get it tomorrow.’ Ramy frowned. ‘What is it?’
My readings, Robin almost said, but that couldn’t be right, because he’d purportedly been working on them all night. ‘Ah – just my diary. It’ll keep me up if I leave it, I’m nervous about anyone seeing my notes—’
‘What’s in there, a love letter?’
‘No, it’s just – it makes me nervous.’
Either he was a spectacular liar, or Ramy was too sleepy to care. ‘Make sure I get up tomorrow,’ he said, yawning. ‘I’m spending all night with Dryden, and I don’t like it.’
‘Will do,’ Robin promised, and hastened out the door.
The punishing rainfall made the ten-minute walk up High Street feel like an eternity. Babel shone in the distance like a warm candle, each floor still fully lit as if it were the middle of the afternoon, though hardly any silhouettes were visible through the windows. Babel’s scholars worked round the clock, but most took their books home with them by nine or ten, and anyone still there at midnight was not likely to leave the tower until morning.
When he reached the green, he paused and peered around. He saw no one. Griffin’s letter had been so vague; he didn’t know if he should wait until he glimpsed one of the Hermes operatives, or if he should go ahead and follow his orders precisely.
Do not deviate from my instructions.
The bells rang for midnight. He hurried up to the entrance, mouth dry, breathless. When he reached the stone steps, two figures materialized from the darkness – both black-clad youths whose faces he could not make out in the rain.
‘Go on,’ one of them whispered. ‘Hurry.’
Robin stepped up to the door. ‘Robin Swift,’ he said, softly but clearly.
The wards recognized his blood. The lock clicked.
Robin pulled the door open and paused for the briefest moment on the doorstep, just long enough for the figures behind him to slink into the tower. He never saw their faces. They dashed up the staircase like wraiths, quick and silent. Robin stood in the foyer, shivering as rain dripped down his forehead, watching the clock as the seconds ticked towards the five-minute mark.
It was all so easy. When the time came, Robin turned and strode out the door. He felt a slight bump at his waist, but otherwise perceived nothing: no whispers, no clinks of silver bars. The Hermes operatives were swallowed by the dark. In seconds, it was as if they had never been there at all.
Robin turned and walked back toward Magpie Lane, shivering violently, dizzy with the sheer audacity of what he’d just done.
He slept badly. He kept tossing in his bed in a nightmarish fugue, soaking his sheets with sweat, tortured by half dreams, anxious extrapolations in which the police kicked down his door and dragged him off to gaol, declaring they’d seen everything and knew everything. He did not fall properly asleep until the early morning, and by then he was so exhausted he missed the morning bells. He did not awake until the scout knocked at his door, asking if he’d like his floors swept that day.
‘Oh – yes, sorry, just give me a moment and I’ll be out.’ He splashed water on his face, dressed, and dashed out the door. His cohort had arranged to meet in a study room on the fifth floor to compare their translations before class, and now he was terribly late.
‘There you are,’ said Ramy when he arrived. He, Letty, and Victoire were all seated around a square table. ‘I’m sorry I left without you, but I thought you’d gone already – I knocked twice but you never answered.’
‘It’s all right.’ Robin took a seat. ‘I didn’t sleep well – must have been the thunder, I think.’
‘Are you feeling all right?’ Victoire looked concerned. ‘You’re sort of . . .’ She waved a hand vaguely before her face. ‘Pale?’
‘Just nightmares,’ he said. ‘Happens, um, sometimes.’
This excuse sounded stupid the moment it left his mouth, but Victoire gave his hand a sympathetic pat. ‘Of course.’
‘Could we start?’ Letty asked sharply. ‘We’ve just been dithering around with vocabulary because Ramy wouldn’t let us go on without you.’
Robin hastily shuffled through his pages until he found last night’s assigned Ovid. ‘Sorry – yes, of course.’
He’d feared he would never sit through the entire meeting. But somehow, the warm sunlight against the cool wood, the scratch of ink against parchment, and Letty’s crisp, clear dictation pulled his exhausted mind into focus, made Latin, not his impending expulsion, seem like the most pressing order of the day.
The study meeting turned out much livelier than expected. Robin, who was used to reading his translations out loud to Mr Chester, who drolly corrected him as he went, was not anticipating such hearty debate over turns of phrase, punctuation, or how much repetition was too much. It quickly became apparent they had drastically different translation styles. Letty, who was a stickler for grammatical structures that adhered to the Latin as much as possible, seemed ready to forgive the most astoundingly awkward manipulations of prose, while Ramy, her polar opposite, was always ready to abandon technical accuracy for rhetorical flourishes he insisted would better deliver the point, even when this meant insertion of completely novel clauses. Victoire seemed constantly frustrated with the limits of English – ‘It’s so awkward, French would suit this better’ – and Letty always vehemently agreed, which made Ramy snort, at which point the topic of Ovid was abandoned for a repeat of the Napoleonic Wars.
‘Feeling better?’ Ramy asked Robin when they adjourned.
He was, actually. It felt good to sink into the refuge of a dead language, to fight a rhetorical war whose stakes could not really touch him. He was astonished by how ordinary the rest of the day felt, how calmly he could sit among his cohort as Professor Playfair lectured and pretend that Tytler was the foremost subject on his mind. In the light of day, the exploits of last night seemed a faraway dream. The tangible and solid consisted of Oxford, of coursework and professors and freshly baked scones and clotted cream.
Still, he could not erase the lurking dread that this was all a cruel joke, that the curtains would come down any minute on this charade. For how could there not be some consequence? Such an act of betrayal – of stealing from Babel itself, the institution to which he’d literally given his blood – should surely have made this life impossible.
Anxiety hit him properly midafternoon. What had last night seemed like such a thrilling, righteous mission now seemed incredibly stupid. He couldn’t focus on Latin; Professor Craft had to snap her fingers in front of his eyes before he realized she’d asked him three times over to scan a line. He kept imagining horrible scenarios with vivid detail – how the constables would burst in, point, and yell, There he is, the thief; how his cohort would stare, stunned; how Professor Lovell, who was for some reason both prosecutor and judge, would coldly sentence Robin to the noose. He imagined the fireplace poker, coming down again and again, cold and methodical, snapping every single one of his bones.
But the visions remained only that. No one came to arrest him. Their class proceeded slowly, blandly, uninterrupted. His terror faded. By the time Robin and his cohort reassembled in hall for supper, he found it astonishingly easy to pretend to himself that last night had never happened. And once they were seated with their food – cold potatoes and steak so tough it took all their might to hack off chewable bits – laughing at Professor Craft’s irritated corrections of Ramy’s embellished translations, it indeed felt like only a distant memory.
A new note awaited him under the windowsill when he returned home that night. He unfolded it with shaking hands. The message scrawled within was very brief, and this time Robin managed to decode it in his head.
Await further contact.
His disappointment confused him. Hadn’t he spent the day wishing he’d never been ensnared in this nightmare? He could just imagine Griffin’s mocking voice – What, did you want a pat on the back? A biscuit for a job well done?
He now found himself hoping for more. But he had no way of knowing when he might hear from Griffin again. Griffin had warned Robin their contact would be sporadic, that entire terms might pass before he was in touch again. Robin would be summoned when he was needed, and no sooner. He found no note at his windowsill the next evening, or the evening after that.
Days passed, and then weeks.
You’re still a Babel student, Griffin had told him. Act like one.
It turned out this was very easy to do. As the memories of Griffin and Hermes receded into the back of his mind, into nightmares and the dark, his life at Oxford and at Babel rose to the forefront in glaring, dazzling colour.
It stunned him, how quickly he fell in love with the place and the people. He hadn’t even noticed it happening. His first term had him spinning in place, dazed and exhausted; his classes and coursework formed a rote pattern of frenzied readings and late, bleary-eyed nights against which his cohort was his only source of joy and solace. The girls, bless them, quickly forgave Robin and Ramy for their first impressions. Robin discovered he and Victoire shared the same unabashed love of literature of all kinds from Gothic horrors to romances, and they took great pleasure in swapping and discussing the latest batch of penny dreadfuls brought in from London. And Letty, once she’d been persuaded the boys were indeed not too stupid to be at Oxford, became a great deal more tolerable. She turned out to possess both an acerbic wit and a keen understanding of the British class structure by virtue of her upbringing, which made for infinitely amusing commentary when it wasn’t aimed at either of them.
‘Colin’s the sort of bottom-feeding middle-class leech who likes to pretend he’s got connections because his family knows a mathematics tutor in Cambridge,’ she would say after a visit to Magpie Lane. ‘If he wants to be a solicitor, he could just get an apprenticeship at the Inns of Court, but he’s here because he wants the prestige and connections, only he’s not half charming enough to acquire them. He’s got the personality of a wet towel: damp, and he clings.’
At this point she would do an impression of Colin’s wide-eyed, oversolicitous greetings while the rest of them roared with laughter.
Ramy, Victoire, and Letty – they became the colours of Robin’s life, the only regular contact he had with the world outside his coursework. They needed each other because they had no one else. The older students at Babel were aggressively insular; they were too busy, too intimidatingly brilliant and impressive. Two weeks into the term Letty boldly asked a graduate fellow named Gabriel if she might join the French reading group, but was swiftly rejected with the particular disdain only the French could muster. Robin tried to befriend a Japanese third-year student named Ilse Dejima,* who spoke with a faint Dutch accent. They crossed paths often on their ways in and out of Professor Chakravarti’s office, but the few times he tried to say hello to her she made a face as if he were mud on her boots.
They tried to befriend the second-year cohort, too, a group of five white boys who lived just across the way on Merton Street. But this went south immediately when one of them, Philip Wright, told Robin at a faculty dinner that the first-year cohort was largely international only because of departmental politics. ‘The board of undergraduate studies is always fighting over whether to prioritize European languages, or other . . . more exotic languages. Chakravarti and Lovell have been making a stink about diversifying the student body for years. They didn’t like that my cohort are all Classicists. I assume they were overcorrecting with you.’
Robin tried to be polite. ‘I’m not sure why that’s such a bad thing.’
‘Well, it’s not a bad thing per se, but it does mean spots taken away from equally qualified candidates who passed the entrance exams.’
‘I didn’t take any entrance exams,’ said Robin.
‘Precisely.’ Philip sniffed, and did not say another word to Robin for the entire evening.
So it was Ramy, Letty, and Victoire who became such constant interlocutors that Robin started seeing Oxford through their eyes. Ramy would adore that purple scarf hanging in the window of Ede & Ravenscroft; Letty would laugh herself silly at the puppy-eyed young man sitting outside Queen’s Lane Coffeehouse with a book of sonnets; Victoire would be so excited that a new batch of scones had just been put out at Vaults & Garden but because she would be stuck in her French tutorial until noon, Robin absolutely had to buy one, wrap it up in his pocket, and save it for her for when class was let out. Even his course readings became more exciting when he began seeing them as source material for cutting observations, complaining or humorous, to be shared later with the group.
