Babel

by R.F. Kuang

he was afraid of how he might react if he did go home; if he stepped back into the world of a forgotten childhood. What if, upon return, he couldn’t bring himself to leave? Worse, what if he felt nothing at all?

That summer felt all the more precious because they all knew it couldn’t last,

But the future, vague as it was frightening, was easily ignored for now; it paled so against the brilliance of the present.

And that was the heart of it all, wasn’t it? Robin had always been willing, in theory, to give up only some things for a revolution he halfway believed in. He was fine with resistance as long as it didn’t hurt him. And the contradiction was fine, as long as he didn’t think too hard about it, or look too closely. But spelled out like this, in such bleak terms, it seemed inarguable that far from being a revolutionary, Robin, in fact, had no convictions whatsoever.

‘And are we obligated to distribute silver bars all around the world to backward countries who have had every opportunity to construct their own centres of translation? It takes no great investment to study foreign languages. Why must it be Britain’s problem if other nations fail to take advantage of what they have?’

But what right did Griffin have to judge his choices? Staying at Babel, at Oxford, wasn’t indulgence; it was survival. It was his only ticket into this country, the one thing between him and the streets.

‘Now it weighs on your conscience. Keep it, Robin Swift. Carry it in your front pocket. Pull it out whenever you begin to doubt, and let it remind you which side are the villains.’

he hadn’t the faintest clue whether he’d done the right thing, what right and wrong meant at all, or how the pieces might now fall.

Lie, Ramiz. This was the lesson, the most important lesson he’d ever been taught. Hide, Ramiz. Show the world what they want; contort yourself into the image they want to see, because seizing control of the story is how you in turn control them.

Outside, he dazzled. Inside, he felt like a fraud, a traitor. And he was just starting to despair, to wonder if all he would ever accomplish was to become a lackey of empire as Wilson had intended, for the avenues of anticolonial resistance seemed so few, and so hopeless.

he was busy sulking, still both baffled and resentful at how he’d lost his friends in the process of trying to save them.

‘Dàn. It looks like this.’ He drew the character in the air: 旦. ‘Up top is the radical for the sun – rì.’ He drew 日. ‘And under that, a line. And I’m just thinking about how it’s beautiful because it’s so simple. It’s the most direct use of pictography, see. Because dawn is just the sun coming up over the horizon.’

This line of argument again. Robin could have kicked something. Always this, the argument from bondage, as if his loyalties were shackled by privilege he had not asked for and did not choose to receive. Did he owe Oxford his life, just because he had drunk champagne within its cloisters? Did he owe Babel his loyalty because he had once believed its lies?

What he wanted, Robin thought, was for Professor Lovell to admit what he’d done. That it was unnatural, this entire arrangement; that children were not stock to be experimented on, judged for their blood, spirited away from their homeland in service of Crown and country. That Robin was more than a talking dictionary, and that his motherland was more than a fat golden goose.

He had become so good at holding two truths in his head at once. That he was an Englishman and not. That Professor Lovell was his father and not. That the Chinese were a stupid, backwards people, and that he was also one of them. That he hated Babel, and wanted to live forever in its embrace. He had danced for years on the razor’s edge of these truths, had remained there as a means of survival, a way to cope, unable to accept either side fully because an unflinching examination of the truth was so frightening that the contradictions threatened to break him. But he could not go on like this. He could not exist a split man, his psyche constantly erasing and re-erasing the truth. He felt a great pressure in the back of his mind. He felt like he would quite literally burst, unless he stopped being double. Unless he chose.

The origins of the word anger were tied closely to physical suffering. Anger was first an ‘affliction’, as meant by the Old Icelandic angr, and then a ‘painful, cruel, narrow’ state, as meant by the Old English enge, which in turn came from the Latin angor, which meant ‘strangling, anguish, distress’. Anger was a chokehold. Anger did not empower you. It sat on your chest; it squeezed your ribs until you felt trapped, suffocated, out of options. Anger simmered, then exploded. Anger was constriction, and the consequent rage a desperate attempt to breathe. And rage, of course, came from madness.*

Afterwards, Robin wondered often if Professor Lovell had seen something in his eyes, a fire he hadn’t known his son possessed, and whether that – his startled realization that his linguistic experiment had developed a will of his own – had prompted Robin in turn to act. He would try desperately to justify what he’d done as self-defence, but such justification would rely on details he could hardly remember, details he wasn’t sure whether he’d made up to convince himself he had not really murdered his father in cold blood. Over and over again he would ask himself who had moved first, and this would torture him for the rest of his days, for he truly did not know.

He did not know what made him say it, the word for father. Perhaps he thought it would stun Professor Lovell, that the shock alone would bring him back to life, that he could yank his father’s soul back to his body by naming the one thing that they had never named. But Professor Lovell was limp, gone, and no matter how hard Robin shook him the blood would not stop pouring.

‘There is no world in which you go to prison and the rest of us walk free. You see this, right? Either we protect you, or we damn ourselves.’

Ramy no longer had any ideological grounds to resent him, for between them, only one of them had killed a colonizer. They were co-conspirators now, and this brought them closer than they ever had been.

The four of them took turns losing their minds. There was an unspoken rule to this game: one of them was allowed to break down at a time, but not all of them at once, for the duty of the saner heads was to talk the mad one down.

When it came down to it, they simply could not think of themselves as anything else but students, couldn’t imagine a world where they did not belong to Babel. Babel was all they knew. Babel was home. And though he knew it was stupid, Robin suspected he wasn’t the only one who believed deep down that, despite everything, there was a world where once this trouble ended, once all necessary arrangements had been made and things were swept under the rug, he might still return to his room on Magpie Lane, might wake up to gentle birdsong and warm sunlight streaming through the narrow window, and once again spend his days poring over nothing but dead languages.

There was nothing more to say at all, except the truth, which was that of course they wouldn’t have trusted her. That for all their history, for all their declarations of eternal friendship, they had no way of knowing which side she would take.

‘Our minds are made up,’ Victoire said gently, but firmly. ‘We’re taking this to Hermes, as soon as we arrive in Oxford. And you don’t have to go with us – we can’t force you to take that risk; we know you’ve suffered so much already. But if you’re not with us, then we ask you at least to keep our secrets.’ ‘What do you mean?’ Letty cried. ‘Of course I’m with you. You’re my friends, I’m with you until the end.’

Masters are masters in the end.’

I think it’s not inconceivable that one day, most of the world will speak only English.’

‘But that’s the great contradiction of colonialism.’ Cathy uttered this like a simple matter of fact. ‘It’s built to destroy that which it prizes most.’

He felt the same as he had the night of the commemoration ball, dancing on the tables under the fairy lights. How magical, he thought; how impossible, that a place like this could exist, a distillation of all that Babel promised. He felt he’d been looking for a place like this all his life, and still he’d betrayed it.

‘Nice comes from the Latin word for “stupid”,’* said Griffin. ‘We do not want to be nice.’

‘We don’t need an army,’ said Griffin. ‘They’re scholars, not soldiers. You take a gun in there, wave it around and shout for a bit, and you’ve taken the whole tower hostage. And then you’ve taken the whole country hostage. Babel is the crux, Anthony; it’s the source of all the Empire’s power. We’ve only got to seize it.’ Robin stared at him, alarmed. In Chinese, the phrase huǒyàowèi* meant literally ‘the taste of gunpowder’; figuratively, ‘belligerence, combativeness’. His brother smelled of gunpowder. He reeked of violence.

‘But think of what would happen,’ Griffin insisted. ‘What does this country do without enchanted silver? Without the people to maintain it? Steam power, gone. Perpetual lamps, gone. Building reinforcements, gone. The roads would deteriorate, the carriages would malfunction – forget Oxford, the whole of England would fall apart in months. They’d be brought to their knees. Paralysed.’ ‘And dozens of innocent people would die,’ said Anthony. ‘We are not entertaining this.’ ‘Fine.’ Griffin sat back and folded his arms. ‘Have it your way. Let’s be lobbyists.’

‘Jesus—’ ‘Scary, isn’t it? Think, why is this more frightening than a knife?’ Griffin did not move his arm. ‘It says I’m willing to kill you, and all I have to do is pull this trigger. I can kill at a distance, without effort. A gun takes all the hard work out of murder and makes it elegant. It shrinks the distance between resolve and action, you see?’

‘I’d take it all back if I could,’ Robin insisted. He didn’t know why it felt so important that Griffin believe him, but this seemed like the last line he had to hold, the last truth he had to maintain about his identity. Otherwise he didn’t recognize himself.

So what if you’re a killer, brother? The world’s better off without the professor in it. Stop shrivelling under the weight of your conscience and take the damned credit.’

The problem is that we’re always living like we’ve lost. We’re all living like you. We see their guns, their silver-work, and their ships, and we think it’s already over for us. We don’t stop to consider how even the playing field actually might be. And we never consider what things would look like if we took the gun.’

‘Violence shows them how much we’re willing to give up,’ said Griffin. ‘Violence is the only language they understand, because their system of extraction is inherently violent. Violence shocks the system. And the system cannot survive the shock. You have no idea what you’re capable of, truly. You can’t imagine how the world might shift unless you pull the trigger.’ Griffin pointed at the middle birch. ‘Pull the trigger, kid.’

‘Justice is exhausting.’

Grief suffocated. Grief paralysed. Grief was a cruel, heavy boot pressed so hard against his chest that he could not breathe. Grief took him out of his body, made his injuries theoretical.

he couldn’t feel anything other than the singular, blinding pain of Ramy’s loss. And he did not want to feel anything else, did not want to sink into his body and register its hurts, because that physical pain would mean he was alive, and because being alive meant that he had to move forward. But he could not go on. Not from this.

And, certainly, Letty could not have been aiming for his heart. That was also impossible. She loved him, she loved him almost like Robin loved him – she’d told him so, he remembered, and if that were true, then how could she look into Ramy’s eyes and shoot to kill?

Perhaps when Robin escaped this place, when they were reunited, they’d laugh so hard over this whole thing that their ribs hurt.

He hoped. He hoped until hope became its own form of torture. The original meaning of hope was ‘to desire’, and Robin wanted with every ounce of his being a world that no longer was. He hoped until he thought he was going mad,

What a uniquely terrible torture. What genius had thought this up? The point was, surely, to inundate him with the despair of every other poor soul who had been imprisoned here, to fill him with such unfathomable sadness that, when questioned, he would give up anyone and anything to make it stop. But these whispers were redundant. They did not darken his thoughts; they merely echoed them. Ramy was dead; Hermes was lost. The world could not go on. The future was only a vast expanse of black, and the only thing that gave him a shred of hope was the promise that someday, all this would end.

Simply – why? You got everything you could possibly want. You’ll never have to work a day in your life – not real work, anyhow; it doesn’t count when it’s scholarship. You’re swimming in riches.’ ‘My countrymen aren’t,’ said Robin. ‘But you aren’t your countrymen!’ exclaimed Sterling. ‘You are the exception. You are the lucky one, the elevated. Or do you really find more in common with those poor fools in Canton than your fellow Oxfordians?’ ‘I do,’ said Robin. ‘Your country reminds me every day that I do.’

They both thought this was a matter of individual fortunes instead of systematic oppression, and neither could see outside the perspective of people who looked and spoke just like them.

‘This world belongs to those who grasp.

Why fight the current? Why this absurd impulse to bite the hand that feeds you?’ ‘The university doesn’t own me.’ ‘Bah. The university gave you everything.’ ‘The university ripped us from our homes and made us believe that our futures could only consist of serving the Crown,’ said Robin. ‘The university tells us we are special, chosen, selected, when really we are severed from our motherlands and raised within spitting distance of a class we can never truly become a part of. The university turned us against our own and made us believe our only options were complicity or the streets. That was no favour, Sterling. It was cruelty. Don’t ask me to love my master.’

‘It took some experimenting before we got it right, but we’ve now perfected the effect. It’ll hurt, Robin Swift. It’ll hurt like hell. I’ve tried it before, just out of curiosity. It’s not a surface-level pain, see; it’s not like being stabbed with a blade, or even like being burned by flames. It’s inside you. Like your wrists are shattering, over and over again, only there’s no upper limit to the agony, because physically, you’re fine – it’s all in your head. It’s quite awful. You’ll strain against it, of course. The body can’t help it, not against pain like that. But every time you struggle, the pain will double, and double again. Would you like to see for yourself?’

He had not known human flesh could feel such pain. Control, said Griffin again. Then another voice, horribly familiar: That’s one good thing about you. When you’re beaten, you don’t cry. Restraint. Repression. Had he not practised this his entire life? Let the pain slide off you like raindrops, without acknowledgment, without reaction, because to pretend it is not happening is the only way to survive. Sweat dripped down his forehead. He fought to push past the blinding agony, to gain a sense of his arms and hold them still. It was the most difficult thing he’d ever done; it felt like he was forcing his own wrists under a hammer. But the pain subsided. Robin slumped forward, gasping.

‘Kill me,’ he gasped. He meant it; he’d never wanted anything more in the world. A mind was not meant to feel this much. Only death would silence the chorus. ‘Holy God, kill me—