Babel

by R.F. Kuang

He entertained himself with ideas of heaven as paradise, of green hills and brilliant skies where he and Ramy could sit and talk and watch an eternal sunset. But such fantasies did not comfort him so much as the idea that all death meant was nothingness, that everything would just stop: the pain, the anguish, the awful, suffocating grief. If nothing else, surely, death meant peace. Still, facing the moment, he was terrified.

They all felt the same, a desperate hope for some chance of escape. In these last moments, the seconds weren’t enough. In theory this decision they’d made was something beautiful. In theory they would be martyrs, heroes, the ones who’d pushed history off its path. But none of that was a comfort. In the moment, all that mattered was that death was painful and frightening and permanent, and none of them wanted to die. But even as they trembled, not one of them broke. It was only a wish, after all.

Robin placed his hand on the nearest pyramid, closed his eyes, and breathed, ‘Fānyì. Translate.’ The sharp ring echoed through the room, a siren’s screech, reverberating through his bones. A death rattle, resounding all the way up and down the tower, for everyone had carried out their duty; no one had balked.

But what struck him most just then was the beauty. The bars were singing, shaking; trying, he thought, to express some unutterable truth about themselves, which was that translation was impossible, that the realm of pure meaning they captured and manifested would and could not ever be known, that the enterprise of this tower had been impossible from inception.

There was no innate, perfectly comprehensible language; there was no candidate, not English, not French, that could bully and absorb enough to become one. Language was just difference. A thousand different ways of seeing, of moving through the world. No; a thousand worlds within one. And translation – a necessary endeavour, however futile, to move between them.

‘It’s so odd,’ Robin said. Back then they’d already passed the point of honesty; they spoke to one another unfiltered, unafraid of the consequences. ‘It’s like I’ve known you forever.’ ‘Me too,’ Ramy said. ‘And that makes no sense,’ said Robin, drunk already, though there was no alcohol in the cordial. ‘Because I’ve known you for less than a day, and yet . . .’ ‘I think,’ said Ramy, ‘it’s because when I speak, you listen.’

‘That’s just what translation is, I think. That’s all speaking is. Listening to the other and trying to see past your own biases to glimpse what they’re trying to say. Showing yourself to the world, and hoping someone else understands.’

Robin looked up and saw Babel, falling in and upon him, and beyond that, the sky before dawn.

But he’d waited for death to come before. He remembered this now - he knew death. Not so abruptly, no, not so violently. But the memory of waiting to fade was still locked in his bones; memories of a stale, hot room, of paralysis, of dreaming about the end. He remembered the stillness. The peace.

Victoire Desgraves has always been good at surviving. The key, she has learned, is refusing to look back.

But survival demands severing the cord. Survival demands she look only to the future.

possibilities – hope – are the only things she can cling to now.

She has the faces of her dead friends engraved in her memory. She keeps imagining their last moments: their terror, their pain as the walls came crumbling down around them.

She does not, will not let herself think of her friends as they were, alive and happy. Not Ramy, torn down in his prime; not Robin, who brought down a tower upon himself because he couldn’t think of a way to keep on living. Not even Letty, who remains alive; who, if she knows Victoire lives too, will hunt her to the ends of the earth. Letty, she knows, cannot allow her to roam free. Even the idea of Victoire is a threat. It threatens the core of her very being. It is proof that she is, and always was, wrong. She won’t let herself grieve that friendship, as true and terrible and abusive as it was. There will come a time for grief. There will come many nights on the voyage when the sadness is so great it threatens to tear her apart; when she regrets her decision to live; when she curses Robin for placing this burden on her, because he was right: he was not being brave, he was not choosing sacrifice. Death is seductive. Victoire resists.

Victory is not assured. Victory may be in the portents, but it must be urged there by violence, by suffering, by martyrs, by blood. Victory is wrought by ingenuity, persistence, and sacrifice. Victory is a game of inches, of historical contingencies where everything goes right because they have made it go right.

‘Robbery, butchery, and theft – they call these things empire, and where they create a desert, they call it peace.’

He would never know, for instance, that there was a time when Griffin, Sterling, Anthony, and Evie had thought of themselves as a cohort as eternally bonded as Robin’s did; or that Griffin and Sterling had quarrelled once over Evie, bright and vibrant and brilliant and beautiful Evie, or that Griffin truly hadn’t meant it when he’d killed her. In his retellings of that night, Griffin made himself out to be a calm and deliberate murderer. But the truth was that, like Robin, he’d acted without thinking, from anger, from fear, but not from malice; he did not even really believe it would work, for silver responded only sporadically to his command, and he didn’t know what he’d done until Evie was bleeding out on the floor. Nor would he ever know that Griffin, unlike Robin, had no cohort to lean on after his act, no one to help him absorb the shock of this violence. And so he’d swallowed it, curled in around it, made it a part of himself – and while for others this might have been the first step on the road to madness, Griffin Lovell had instead whittled this capacity to kill into a sharp and necessary weapon.

Babel had become synonymous with foreign, and this was very strange, because before this, the Royal Institute of Translation had always been regarded as a national treasure, a quintessentially English institution.