Babel

by R.F. Kuang

There was only the vast expanse of time and the black grief that engulfed it. He wept until he was hollow. He screamed until it hurt to breathe. Sometimes the waves of pain subsided ever so slightly and he thought he could organize his thoughts, take stock of his situation, ponder his next move. What came next? Was victory on the table any longer, or was there only survival? But Ramy and Victoire permeated everything. Every time he saw the slightest glimpse of the future, he remembered they would not be in it, and then the tears flowed again, and the suffocating boot of grief came down again on his chest. He considered dying. It would not be so hard; he needed only to strike his head against stone with enough effort or figure out some way to strangle himself with his cuffs. The pain of it did not frighten him. His whole body felt numb; it seemed impossible that he might feel anything ever again except the overwhelming sense of drowning – and perhaps, he thought, death was the only way to break the surface.

Death by hanging might be quick – perhaps even easy, painless. He felt guilty for even considering it – that’s selfish, Ramy had said, you don’t get to take the easy way out. But what in God’s name was he still alive for? Robin could not see how anything he did from now on mattered. His despair was total. They had lost, they had lost with such crushing completeness, and there was nothing left. If he clung to life for the days or weeks he had left, it was solely for Ramy’s sake, because he did not deserve what was easy.

It was over so quickly Robin hardly registered what was happening. Griffin whipped out his revolver. Sterling pointed his gun at Griffin’s chest. They must have pulled their triggers simultaneously, for the noise that split the night sounded like a single shot. They both collapsed at once.

The shot boomed like a cannon. Griffin convulsed and lay still. Robin doubled over, screaming, but there was no sound to his anguish, no shape to his pain; he was incorporeal, voiceless, and though he suffered the kind of shattering grief that demanded shrieking, beating, a ripping of the world – and if not the world, then himself – he could not move; until the square was clear, all he could do was wait, and watch.

Some kind of love story had concluded on this square – some vicious triangle of desire, resentment, jealousy, and hatred had opened with Evie’s death and closed with Griffin’s. Its details were murky, would never be known to Robin in full;* all he knew, with certainty, was that this was not the first time Griffin and Sterling had tried to kill each other, only the first time one of them had succeeded. But all the principal characters were dead now, and the circle was closed.

Of course she could support lobbying for change, as long as it was peaceful, respectable, civilized. But then they were talking about blackmail. About kidnapping, rioting, blowing up a shipyard. This was vindictive, violent, awful. And she couldn’t bear it – watching that horrible Griffin Lovell speak, that delighted glimmer in his eyes, and watching Ramy, her Ramy, nodding along. She could not believe it, what he’d become. What they’d all become.

It was like waking up, like being doused with cold water. What was she doing here? What was she entertaining? This was no noble fight, only a shared delusion. There was no future down this path. She saw this now. She’d been duped, strung along in this sickening charade, but this ended in only two ways: prison or the hangman. She was the only one there who wasn’t too mad to see it. And though it killed her, she had to act with resolve – for if she could not save her friends, she had at least to save herself.

They would obey because he threatened violence. He couldn’t remember why the thought of acting had scared him so before. Griffin was right – the obstacle was not the struggle, but the failure to imagine it was possible at all, the compulsion to cling to the safe, the survivable status quo. But the whole world was off its hinges now. Every door was wide open. They’d moved past the realm of ideas now, into the realm of action, and this was something Oxford students were wholly unprepared for.

Deep down, neither of them had expected to actually get this far. Their visions of today had involved chaos: a violent and devastating last stand; a fracas that, in all likelihood, ended in death. They’d been prepared for sacrifice; they had not been prepared to win.

Britain could not hurt Babel without hurting itself. And so Babel alone, an asset denied, could grind the Empire to a halt.

They were all suffering the same unspoken, private fear, a creeping dread that this strike might do nothing but damn themselves, and that their cries would go unheard into the unforgiving dark.

Then the tower collapsed, as simply and cleanly as a sandcastle kicked at the base. It took less than ten seconds for the building to fall, but nearly a minute for the rumbling to settle. Then, where Magdalen Tower had once stood was a great mound of brick, dust, and stone. And it was somehow lovely, unnervingly lovely because it was so awful, because it violated the rules of how things were supposed to move. That the city’s horizon could, in an instant, be changed this dramatically was both breathtaking and awesome.

How slender, how fragile, the foundations of an empire. Take away the centre, and what’s left? A gasping periphery, baseless, powerless, cut down at the roots.

It all works beautifully, until it doesn’t.’

He wanted a fight. He wanted to jump down there and bloody their faces with his fists. Wanted them to know exactly what he was, which was their worst nightmare – uncivilized, brutal, violent.

It finally sank in that they’d passed the point of no return, that this was no temporary divergence; there would be no resumption of normal life. They emerged from here the victors, the harbingers of an unrecognizable Britain, or they left this tower dead.

Everywhere the silver industrial revolution had wrought poverty, inequality, and suffering, while the only ones who benefited were those in power at the heart of the Empire. And the grand accomplishment of the imperial project was to take only a little from so many places; to fragment and distribute the suffering so that at no point did it ever become too much for the entire community to bear. Until it did. And if the oppressed came together, if they rallied around a common cause – here, now, was one of the impossible pivot points Griffin had spoken of so often. Here was their chance to push history off its course.

Robin and Victoire exchanged a glance. They both felt rather ashamed now of their disdain for the strikers over the past year. They’d bought into Professor Lovell’s claims, that the strikers were simply lazy, pathetic, and undeserving of basic economic dignities. But how different, really, were their causes? ‘It was never about the silver,’ said Abel. ‘You realize that now, don’t you? It was about the wage-cutting. The shoddy work. The women and children kept all day in hot airless rooms, the danger of untested machines the eye can’t track. We were suffering. And we only wanted to make you see it.’ ‘I know,’ Robin said. ‘We know that now.’ ‘And we weren’t there to harm any of you. Well, not seriously.’ Victoire hesitated, then nodded. ‘I can try to believe that.’

What a sight, this influx of defenders to the tower. The barricades had the peculiar effect of building community. They were all comrades in arms behind those walls, no matter their origins, and the regular deliveries of foodstuffs to the tower came with handwritten messages of encouragement. Robin had expected only violence, not solidarity, and he wasn’t sure what to do with this show of support. It defied what he had come to expect of the world. He was scared to let it make him hope.

‘No one goes to Cambridge unless they can’t find a job here,’ Professor Chakravarti said. ‘Sad.’ Robin cast them an amazed look. ‘Are you telling me this country’s going to fall because of academic territoriality?’ ‘Well, yes.’ Professor Craft lifted her teacup to her lips. ‘It’s Oxford, what did you expect?’

We only have two demands, Robin wrote in a series of pamphlets, which had become his way of responding to the town’s outcries. Parliament knows this. Refusal to go to war, and amnesty. Your fate lies in their hands.

we all got good at choosing not to think about certain things.’

‘Only it builds up, doesn’t it? It doesn’t just disappear. And one day you start prodding at what you’ve suppressed. And it’s a mass of black rot, and it’s endless, horrifying, and you can’t look away.’

‘Victoire, please, I just think we need to escalate, otherwise—’ ‘I think you want it to fall,’ she accused. ‘I think this is just retribution for you, because you want to see it fall.’ ‘And why not?’ They’d had this argument before. The ghosts of Anthony and Griffin loomed between them: one guided by the conviction that the enemy would at least act in rational self-interest, if not altruism, and the other guided less by conviction, less by telos, and more by sheer, untrammelled rage.

‘Doesn’t it kill you?’ His voice broke. ‘Knowing what they’ve done? Seeing their faces? I can’t imagine a world where we coexist with them. Doesn’t it split you apart?’

‘And you are comfortable with this?’ Professor Chakravarti glanced about, as if trying to gauge the moral temperature of the room. ‘Dozens of people will die. There are whole crowds there trying to get on boats at all times of day; what happens when—’ ‘That’s not our choice,’ said Robin. ‘It’s theirs. It’s inaction. It’s killing by letting die. We’re not even touching the resonance rods, it’s going to fall on its own—’ ‘You know very well that doesn’t matter,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘Don’t mince the ethics. Westminster Bridge falling down is your choice. But innocent people can’t determine the whims of Parliament.’ ‘But it’s their government’s duty to look out for them,’ said Robin. ‘That’s the entire point of Parliament, isn’t it? Meanwhile, we don’t have the option of civility. Or grace. It’s an indiscriminate torch, I’ll admit that, but that’s what the stakes demand. You can’t put the moral blame on me.’ He swallowed. ‘You can’t.’ ‘You are the proximate cause,’ insisted Professor Chakravarti. ‘You can make it stop.’ ‘But that’s precisely the devil’s trick,’ Robin insisted. ‘This is how colonialism works. It convinces us that the fallout from resistance is entirely our fault, that the immoral choice is resistance itself rather than the circumstances that demanded it.’ ‘Even so, there are lines you can’t cross.’ ‘Lines? If we play by the rules, then they’ve already won—’ ‘You’re trying to win by punishing the city,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘That means the whole c...

This was a failure of nerve. A refusal to push things to the limit. Violence was the only thing that brought the colonizer to the table; violence was the only option. The gun was right there, lying on the table, waiting for them to pick it up. Why were they so afraid to even look at it?

‘There is no path to victory here,’ warned Professor Chakravarti. ‘This will only make them hate you.’ Robin scoffed. ‘They can’t hate us any more than they do.’ But no, that was not true; they both knew it. The British did not hate them, because hate was bound up with fear and resentment, and both required seeing your opponent as a morally autonomous being, worthy of respect and rivalry. The attitude the British held towards the Chinese was patronizing, was dismissive; but it was not hatred. Not yet. That might change after the bridge fell.

‘Many think ahimsa means absolute pacifism, and that the Indian people are therefore a sheepish, submissive people who will bend the knee to anything. But in the Bhagavad Gita, exceptions are made for a dharma yuddha. A righteous war. A war in which violence is applied as the last resort, a war fought not for selfish gain or personal motives but from a commitment to a greater cause.’ He shook his head. ‘This is how I have justified this strike, Mr Swift. But what you’re doing here is not self-defence; it has trespassed into malice. Your violence is personal, it is vindictive, and this I cannot support.’

I cannot give up tea.’

‘We were happy then.’ Victoire glanced down, fingers tracing their fading faces. ‘I thought about burning it, you know. I wanted the satisfaction. At Oxford Castle I kept taking it out, studying her face, trying to see . . . to see the person that would do this to us. But the more I look, the more I . . . I just feel sorry for her. It’s twisted, but from her perspective, she must think she’s the one who lost everything. She was so alone, you know. All she wanted was a group of friends, people who could understand what she’d been through. And she thought she’d finally found that in us.’ She took a shaky breath. ‘And I suppose, when it all fell apart – I suppose she felt just as betrayed as we did.’

‘It just scares me,’ he said. ‘I don’t want this to be all we ever were.’

When the tower resumed normal functioning, would they be a part of it? What did scholarship look like in the age after empire, when they knew Britain’s silver stores would dwindle into nothing? They had never considered these questions before, but now, when the outcome of this strike stood on a razor’s edge, their only comfort was in prognosticating the future in such detail that it seemed possible. But Robin couldn’t bring himself to try. He couldn’t bear those conversations; he excused himself whenever they occurred. There was no future without Ramy, without Griffin, without Anthony and Cathy and Ilse and Vimal. As far as he was concerned, time had stopped when Letty’s bullet had left the chamber. All there was now was the fallout. What happened after was for someone else to struggle through. Robin only wanted it all to end.

‘You have to believe there’s an after,’ she murmured. ‘They did.’ ‘They were better than us.’ ‘They were.’ She curled around his arm. ‘But it all still wound up in our hands, didn’t it?’

Go on, he thought; do it again; kill more of them; turn the streets red with the blood of your own. Show them who you are. Show them their whiteness won’t save them.

Insane was not enough to cover it, Robin thought. English was insufficient to describe all this. His mind wandered to old Chinese texts, the idioms they employed about dynastic collapse and change. 天翻地覆; tiānfāndìfù. The heavens fell, and the earth collapsed in on itself. The world turned upside down. Britain was spilling its own blood, Britain was gouging out its own flesh, and nothing after this could go back to the way it had been before.

Only Chinese had a character that encapsulated how much simple words could hurt: 刺, cì, the character for thorns, for stabs, for criticism. Such a flexible character. In a phrase, 刺言, 刺語, it meant ‘barbed, stinging words’. 刺 could mean ‘to goad’. 刺 could also mean ‘to murder’.

You have no idea how much they’re willing to bleed for the sake of their pride. These men let Westminster Bridge fall. What else can you threaten them with?’

‘So you mean to talk us into our deaths,’ Victoire said finally. ‘I don’t,’ said Letty. ‘I mean to save you.’ She blinked, and suddenly tears traced two thin, clear lines down her face. This was not an act; they knew Letty could not act. She was heartbroken, truly heartbroken. She loved them; Robin did not doubt it; at least she really believed that she loved them. She wanted them safe and sound, only her version of a successful resolution was to put them behind bars. ‘I didn’t want any of this,’ she said. ‘I just want things to go back to the way they were. We had a future together, all of us.’

‘You gave them a headache. Well done you. But you are, in the end, expendable. All of you. Losing you would be a minor setback, but the imperial project involves more than a few scholars. And it will span more than a few decades. This nation is trying to achieve what no other civilization has done throughout history, and if mowing you down means a temporary delay, then they’ll do it. They’ll train new translators.’ ‘They won’t,’ said Robin. ‘No one will work for them after this.’ Letty scoffed. ‘Of course they will. We knew very well what they were up to, didn’t we? They told us on the very first day. And we still loved it here. They’ll always be able to find new translators. They’ll relearn what they lost. And they’ll just keep going, because no one else will be there to stop them.’

‘There’s no solution. You’re on a train that you can’t jump off, don’t you see? This can’t end well for anyone. Liberation for us means liberation for you as well.’ ‘Or,’ said Letty, ‘it’ll just keep going faster and faster, and we’ll let it, because if the train’s speeding past everyone else, we may as well be riding it.’

‘I’m trying to save you,’ Letty insisted. ‘I’m your last shot at salvation. Surrender now, come out peacefully, and cooperate with restoration. You won’t be in prison for long. They need you, you said it yourself – you’ll be back at Babel in no time, doing the work you always dreamed of. It’s the best offer you’ll get. That’s all I came here to say. Take it, or you’ll die.’ Then we’ll die, Robin almost said, but stopped himself.

‘We destroy the tower,’ he said. ‘And we destroy ourselves.’

‘How long have you been planning this?’ Victoire demanded. ‘Since the beginning,’ he said. ‘I hate you.’ ‘It’s the only way we have left to win.’ ‘It’s your suicide plan,’ she said angrily. ‘And don’t tell me that it’s anything but. You want this; you’ve always wanted this.’ But that was just it, Robin thought. How did he explain the weight crushing his chest, the constant inability to breathe? ‘I think – ever since Ramy and Griffin – no, ever since Canton, I . . .’ He swallowed. ‘I’ve felt I didn’t have the right.’ ‘Don’t say that.’ ‘It’s true. They were better men, and they died—’ ‘Robin, that’s not how it works—’ ‘And what did I do? I lived a life I shouldn’t have, I had what millions of people didn’t – all that suffering, Victoire, and the whole time I was drinking champagne—’ ‘Don’t you dare.’

‘I want to believe in the future we’re fighting for, but it’s not there, it’s just not there, and I can’t take things day by day when I’m too horrified by the thought of tomorrow. I’m underwater. And I’ve been underwater for so long, and I wanted a way out, but couldn’t find one that didn’t feel like some – some great abdication of responsibility. But this – this is my way out.’

‘We have to die to get their pity,’ said Victoire. ‘We have to die for them to find us noble. Our deaths are thus great acts of rebellion, a wretched lament that highlights their inhumanity. Our deaths become their battle cry. But I don’t want to die, Robin.’ Her throat hitched. ‘I don’t want to die. I don’t want to be their Imoinda, their Oroonoko.* I don’t want to be their tragic, lovely lacquer figure. I want to live.’

‘I want to live,’ she repeated, ‘and live, and thrive, and survive them. I want a future. I don’t think death is a reprieve. I think it’s – it’s just the end. It forecloses everything – a future where I might be happy, and free. And it’s not about being brave. It’s about wanting another chance. Even if all I did was run away, even if I never lifted a finger to help anyone else as long as I lived – at least I would get to be happy. At least the world might be all right, just for a day, just for me. Is that selfish?’

What an anchor she was, he thought, an anchor he did not deserve. She was his rock, his light, the sole presence that had kept him going. And he wished, he wished, that was enough for him to hold on to. ‘Be selfish,’ he whispered. ‘Be brave.’

Silence first; then resignation, then acceptance. They already lived in the impossible; what more was the fall of the most eternal thing they’d ever known?

He saw them all making the same calculation then: the finality of death against the persecution, prison, and possible execution they would face on the outside. Surviving Babel did not necessarily mean survival. And he could see them asking themselves if they could come to terms, now, with their own deaths; if that would, in the end, be easier.