Babel, page 16
They were not without their rifts. They argued endlessly, the way bright young people with well-fed egos and too many opinions do. Robin and Victoire had a long-running debate over the superiority of English versus French literature, wherein both were oddly, fiercely loyal to their adopted countries. Victoire insisted that England’s best theorists could not hold a candle to Voltaire or Diderot, and Robin would have given her the benefit of the doubt if only she didn’t keep scoffing at the translations he took out from the Bodleian on the grounds that ‘They’re nothing compared to the original, you might as well not read it at all.’ Victoire and Letty, though normally quite close, seemed to always get snippy on issues of money and whether Letty truly counted as poor as she claimed to be just because her father had cut her off.* And Letty and Ramy bickered most of all, largely over Ramy’s claim that Letty had never stepped foot in the colonies and therefore shouldn’t opine on the supposed benefits of the British presence in India.
‘I do know a thing or two about India,’ Letty would insist. ‘I’ve read all sorts of essays, I’ve read Hamilton’s Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah—’
‘Oh, yes?’ Ramy would ask. ‘The one where India is a lovely Hindu nation, overrun by tyrannical Muslim invaders? That one?’
At which point Letty would always get defensive, sullen, and irritable until the next day. But this was not entirely her fault. Ramy seemed particularly determined to provoke her, to dismantle her every assertion. Proud, proper Letty with her stiff upper lip represented everything Ramy disdained about the English, and Robin suspected Ramy would not be satisfied until he’d got Letty to declare treason against her own country.
Still, their fights could not really pull them apart. Rather, these arguments only drew them closer together, sharpened their edges, and defined the ways they fitted differently into the puzzle of their cohort. They spent all their time together. On weekends, they sat at a corner table outside the Vaults & Garden café, interrogating Letty on the oddities of English, of which only she was a native speaker. (‘What does corned mean?’ Robin would demand. ‘What is corned beef? What are you all doing to your beef?’* ‘And what is a welcher?’* Victoire would ask, looking up from her latest penny serial. ‘Letitia, please, what in God’s name is a jigger-dubber?’*)
When Ramy complained that the food in hall was so bad that he was visibly dropping weight (this was true; the Univ kitchens, when they weren’t serving the same rotation of tough boiled meat, unsalted roast vegetables, and indistinguishable pottages, put out inexplicable and inedible dishes with names like ‘India Pickle’, ‘Turtle Dressed the West India Way’, and something called ‘China Chilo’, very little of which was halal), they stole into the kitchen and cobbled a dish out of chickpeas, potatoes, and an assortment of spices Ramy had scrounged together from Oxford’s markets. The result was a lumpy scarlet stew so spicy that they all felt like they’d been punched in the nose. Ramy refused to accept defeat; instead, he argued, this was further proof of his grand thesis that there was something fundamentally wrong with the British, since if they’d been able to get their hands on real turmeric and mustard seeds then the dish would have tasted much better.
‘There are Indian restaurants in London,’ Letty objected. ‘You can get curries with rice in Piccadilly—’
‘Only if you want bland mash,’ Ramy scoffed. ‘Finish your chickpeas.’
Letty, sniffling miserably, refused to take another bite. Robin and Victoire stoically kept shovelling spoonfuls into their mouths. Ramy told them they were all cowards – in Calcutta, he claimed, infants could eat ghost peppers without batting an eye. But even he had trouble finishing the fiery-red mass on his plate.
Robin didn’t realize what he had, what he’d been searching for and had finally obtained, until one night halfway through the term when they were all in Victoire’s rooms. Hers were improbably the largest of any of their quarters because none of the other boarders wanted to share with her, which meant not only did she have a bedroom all to herself but also the bathroom and the spacious sitting room where they’d taken to congregating to finish their coursework after the Bodleian closed at nine. That night they were playing cards, not studying, because Professor Craft was in London for a conference, which meant they had the evening off. But the cards were soon forgotten because an intense stench of ripe pears suddenly pervaded the room and none of them could figure out what it was, because they hadn’t been eating pears, and because Victoire swore she didn’t have any stashed away in her room.
Then Victoire was rolling on the ground, both laughing and shrieking because Letty kept screaming, ‘Where is the pear? Where is it, Victoire? Where is the pear?’ Ramy made a joke about the Spanish Inquisition, so Letty, playing along, ordered Victoire to turn out all her coat pockets to prove none of them concealed the core. Victoire obeyed but turned up nothing, which sent them into further shrieks of hysterics. And Robin sat at the table, watching them, smiling as he waited for the card game to resume until he realized that it wouldn’t because they were all laughing too much and, besides, Ramy’s cards were splayed across the floor face-up, so continuing was pointless. Then he blinked, because he’d just registered what this most mundane and extraordinary moment meant – that in the space of several weeks, they had become what he’d never found in Hampstead, what he thought he’d never have again after Canton: a circle of people he loved so fiercely his chest hurt when he thought about them.
A family.
He felt a crush of guilt then for loving them, and Oxford, as much as he did.
He adored it here; he really did. For all the daily slights he suffered, walking through campus delighted him. He simply could not maintain, as Griffin did, an attitude of constant suspicion or rebellion; he could not acquire Griffin’s hatred of this place.
Yet didn’t he have a right to be happy? He had never felt such warmth in his chest until now, had never looked forward to getting up in the morning as he did now. Babel, his friends, and Oxford – they had unlocked a part of him, a place of sunshine and belonging, that he never thought he’d feel again. The world felt less dark.
He was a child starved of affection, which he now had in abundance – and was it so wrong for him to cling to what he had?
He was not ready to commit fully to Hermes. But by God, he would have killed for any of his cohort.
Later, it would amaze Robin that it never seriously crossed his mind to tell any of them about the Hermes Society. After all, by the end of Michaelmas term, he had come to trust them with his life; he had no doubt that if he fell into the frozen Isis, any one of them would have dived in to save him. Yet Griffin and the Hermes Society belonged to bad dreams and shadows; his cohort was sun and warmth and laughter, and he could not imagine bringing those worlds together.
Only once was he ever tempted to say something. At lunch one day, Ramy and Letty were arguing – once again – over the British presence in India. Ramy regarded the occupation of Bengal as an ongoing travesty; Letty thought the British victory at Plassey was more than fair retaliation for what she considered the horrific treatment of hostages by Siraj-ud-daulah, and that the British need never have intervened if the Mughals had not been such terrible rulers.
‘And it’s not as if you have had it all so bad,’ said Letty. ‘There are plenty of Indians in the civil administration, as long as they’re qualified—’
‘Yes, where “qualified” means an elite class that speaks English and acts like toadies to the British,’ said Ramy. ‘We’re not being ruled, we’re being misruled. What’s happening to my country is nothing short of robbery. It’s not open trade; it’s financial bleeding, it’s looting, and sacking. We’ve never needed their help, and they’ve only constructed that narrative out of a misplaced sense of superiority.’
‘If you think that, then what are you doing in England?’ Letty challenged.
Ramy looked at her as if she were crazy. ‘Learning, woman.’
‘Ah, to acquire the weapons to bring down the Empire?’ She scoffed. ‘You’re going to take some silver bars home and start a revolution, are you? Shall we march into Babel and declare your intentions?’
For once, Ramy did not have a quick riposte. ‘It’s not as simple as that,’ he said after a pause.
‘Oh, really?’ Letty had found the spot where it hurt; now she was like a dog with a bone and she wouldn’t let go. ‘Because it seems to me that the fact that you’re here, enjoying an English education, is precisely what makes the English superior. Unless there’s a better language institute in Calcutta?’
‘There’s plenty of brilliant madrasas in India,’ Ramy snapped. ‘What makes the English superior is guns. Guns, and the willingness to use them on innocent people.’
‘So you’re here to ship silver back to those mutinying sepoys, are you?’
Perhaps he should, Robin almost said. Perhaps that’s precisely what the world needs.
But he stopped himself before he opened his mouth. Not because he was afraid of breaking Griffin’s confidence, but because he could not bear how this confession would shatter the life they’d built for themselves. And because he himself could not resolve the contradiction of his willingness to thrive at Babel even as it became clearer, day by day, how obviously unjust were the foundations of its fortunes. The only way he could justify his happiness here, to keep dancing on the edges of two worlds, was to continue awaiting Griffin’s correspondence at night – a hidden, silent rebellion whose main purpose was to assuage his guilt over the fact that all this gold and glitter had to come at a cost.
Chapter Eight
We then used to consider it not the least vulgar for a parcel of lads who had been whipped three months previous, and were not allowed more than three glasses of port at home, to sit down to pineapples and ices at each other’s rooms, and fuddle themselves with champagne and claret.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY, The Book of Snobs
In the last weeks of November, Robin assisted in three more thefts for the Hermes Society. They all followed the efficient, clockwork routine of the first – a note by his windowsill, a rainy night, a midnight rendezvous, and minimal contact with his accomplices save for a quick glance and nod. He never got a closer look at the other operatives. He didn’t know if they were the same people every time. He never found out what they stole or what they used it for. All he knew was that Griffin had said his contribution aided a vaguely defined fight against empire, and all he could do was trust Griffin’s word.
He kept hoping that Griffin would summon him for another chat outside the Twisted Root, but it seemed his half-brother was too busy leading a global organization of which Robin was only a very small part.
Robin was nearly caught during his fourth theft, when a third year named Cathy O’Nell strode through the front door as he was waiting in the foyer. Cathy was, unfortunately, one of the chattier upperclassmen; she specialized in Gaelic, and perhaps due to the sheer loneliness of being one of two people in her subfield, she went out of her way to befriend everyone in the faculty.
‘Robin!’ She beamed at him. ‘What are you doing here so late?’
‘Forgot my Dryden reading,’ he lied, patting his pocket as if he’d just stashed the book there. ‘Turns out I left it in the lobby.’
‘Oh, Dryden, that’s miserable. I remember Playfair had us discussing him for weeks. Thorough, but dry.’
‘Awfully dry.’ He hoped badly she’d get on with it; it was already five past twelve.
‘Is he making you compare translations in class?’ Cathy asked. ‘Once he interrogated me for nearly half an hour over my word choice of red instead of apple-like. I’d nearly sweated through my shirt by the end.’
Six minutes past. Robin’s eyes darted to the staircase, then back at Cathy, then back at the staircase until he realized Cathy was watching him expectantly.
‘Oh.’ He blinked. ‘Erm. Speaking of Dryden, I should really get on—’
‘Oh, I’m sorry, the first year is really so difficult and here I am keeping you—’
‘Anyway, nice to see you—’
‘Let me know if I can be of any assistance,’ she said cheerfully. ‘It’s a lot at first, but the terms do get easier, I promise.’
‘Sure. I will do – bye.’ He felt awful being so curt. She was so nice, and such offers were particularly generous coming from the upperclassmen. But all he could think of then was his accomplices upstairs, and what might happen if they came down at the same time that Cathy went up.
‘Good luck, then.’ Cathy gave him a little wave and headed into the lobby. Robin backed into the foyer and prayed she did not turn around.
An eternity later, two black-clad figures hurried down the opposite staircase.
‘What’d she say?’ one of them whispered. His voice seemed strangely familiar, though Robin was too distracted to try to place it then.
‘Just being friendly.’ Robin pushed the door open, and the three of them hurried out into the cool night. ‘Are you all right?’
But there was no answer. They’d already taken off, leaving him alone in the dark and the rain.
A more cautious personality would have quit Hermes then, would not have risked his entire future on such razor-thin possibilities. But Robin did go back to do it again. He assisted in a fifth theft, and then a sixth. Michaelmas term ended, the winter holidays sped by, and Hilary term began. His heartbeat no longer pounded in his ears when he approached the tower at midnight. The minutes between entrance and exit no longer felt like purgatory. It all started to feel easy, this simple act of opening a door twice; so easy that by the seventh theft, he had convinced himself he was not doing anything dangerous at all.
‘You’re very efficient,’ said Griffin. ‘They like working with you, you know. You stick to the instructions and don’t embellish.’
A week into Hilary term, Griffin had finally deigned to meet Robin again in person. Once more they strode briskly around Oxford, this time following the Thames down south towards Kennington. The meeting felt like a midterm progress report with a harsh and rarely available supervisor, and Robin found himself basking in the praise, trying and failing not to come off as a giddy kid brother.
‘So I’m doing a good job?’
‘You’re doing very well. I’m quite pleased.’
‘So you’ll tell me more about Hermes now?’ Robin asked. ‘Or at least tell me where the bars are going? What you’re doing with them?’
Griffin chuckled. ‘Patience.’
They walked in silence for a stretch. There had been a storm just that morning. The Isis flowed fast and loud under a misty, darkening sky. It was the kind of evening when the world seemed drained of colour, a painting in progress, a sketch really, existing in greys and shadows only.
‘I have another question, then,’ said Robin. ‘And I know you won’t tell me much about Hermes now. But at least tell me how this all ends up.’
‘How what ends up?’
‘I mean – my situation. This current arrangement feels fine – as long as I’m not caught, I mean – but it seems, I don’t know, rather unsustainable.’
‘Of course it’s unsustainable,’ said Griffin. ‘You’ll study hard and graduate, and then they’ll ask you to do all kinds of unsavoury things for the Empire. Or they’ll catch you, as you said. It all comes to a head eventually, like it did for us.’
‘Does everyone at Hermes leave Babel?’
‘I know very few who have stayed.’
Robin was not sure how to feel about this. He often lulled himself into the fantasy of the post-Babel life – a cushy fellowship, if he wanted it; a guarantee of more fully funded years of study in those gorgeous libraries, living in comfortable college housing and tutoring rich undergraduates in Latin if he wanted extra pocket money; or an exciting career travelling overseas with the book buyers and simultaneous interpreters. In the Zhuangzi, which he’d just translated with Professor Chakravarti, the phrase tǎntú* literally meant ‘a flat road’, metaphorically, ‘a tranquil life’. This was what he wanted: a smooth, even path to a future with no surprises.
The only obstacle, of course, was his conscience.
‘You’ll remain at Babel as long as you’re able,’ said Griffin. ‘I mean, you ought to – heaven knows, we need more people on the inside. But it gets harder and harder, you see. You’ll find you can’t reconcile your sense of ethics with what they ask you to do. What happens when they direct you to military research? When they send you to the frontier in New Zealand, or the Cape Colony?’
‘You can’t just avoid those assignments?’
Griffin laughed. ‘Military contracts compose over half of the work orders. They’re a necessary part of the tenure application. And they pay well too – most of the senior faculty got rich fighting Napoleon. How do you think dear old Dad’s able to maintain three houses? It’s violent work that sustains the fantasy.’
‘So then what?’ Robin asked. ‘How do I leave?’
‘Simple. You fake your death, and then you go underground.’
‘Is that what you did?’
‘About five years ago, yes. You will too, eventually. And then you’ll become a shadow on the campus you once had the run of, and pray that some other first year will find it in their conscience to grant you access to your old libraries.’ Griffin shot him a sideways look. ‘You’re not happy with this answer, are you?’
