Babel : Or the Necessity of Violence: an Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution (9780063021440)

‘We were at the college,’ said Ramy. ‘We didn’t know there was a private party.’

‘You should have invited them,’ said a dark-haired German girl whose name Robin thought might be Minna. She danced in place as she spoke, and her head kept bobbing heavily to the left. ‘So cruel of you, to let them go to that horror show.’

‘One does not appreciate heaven until one has known hell,’ said Vimal. ‘Revelations. Or Mark. Or something like that.’

‘That’s not in the Bible,’ said Minna.

‘Well,’ Vimal said dismissively, ‘I wouldn’t know.’

‘That was cruel of you,’ said Letty.

‘Make haste,’ Vimal called over his shoulder. ‘Give the girl some wine.’

Glasses were handed round; port was poured. Soon Robin was very pleasantly drunk, head buzzing, limbs floating. He leaned against the shelves, slightly out of breath from waltzing with Victoire, and basked in the marvellousness of it all. Vimal was now on the table, dancing a vigorous jig with Minna. On the opposite table, Matthew Houndslow, winner of that year’s most prestigious postgraduate fellowship, was inscribing a silver bar with a match-pair that caused bright spheres of pink and purple light to bob around the room.

‘Ibasho,’ said Ilse Dejima.

Robin turned to her. She’d never spoken to him before; he wasn’t sure if she’d meant to address him. But there was no one else around. ‘Pardon?’

‘Ibasho,’ she repeated, swaying. Her arms floated in front of her, either dancing or conducting the music, he couldn’t tell which. For that matter, he couldn’t tell where the music was coming from at all. ‘It doesn’t translate well into English. It means “whereabouts”. A place where one feels like home, where they feel like themselves.’

She wrote out the kanji characters for him in the air – 居场所 – and he recognized their Chinese equivalents. The character for a residence. The characters for a place.

In the months to come, whenever he thought back on this night, he could only grasp a handful of clear memories – after three glasses of port, it all turned into a pleasant haze. Vaguely he remembered dancing to some frantic Celtic tune on tables pushed together, then playing some kind of language game that mostly involved a lot of shouting and rapid rhyming, and laughing so hard his sides hurt. He remembered Ramy sitting with Victoire in a corner, doing silly impersonations of the professors until her tears were dry, and then until they were both crying from laughter. ‘I despise women,’ intoned Ramy in Professor Craft’s severe monotone. ‘They’re flighty, easily distracted, and in general unsuited for the sort of rigorous study that an academic life demands.’

He remembered English phrases rising unbidden to his mind as he watched the revels; phrases from songs and poems that he wasn’t quite sure on the meaning of, but which looked and sounded right – and perhaps that was just what poetry was? Meaning through sound? Through spelling? He couldn’t remember whether he merely thought it, or if he asked it out loud to everyone he came across, but he found himself consumed with the question ‘What is the light fantastic?’^*

And he remembered sitting on the stairs deep into the night with Letty, who wept furiously into his shoulder. ‘I wish he would see me,’ she kept repeating through her hiccups. ‘Why won’t he see me?’ And though Robin could think of any number of reasons – because Ramy was a brown man in England and Letty the daughter of an admiral; because Ramy did not want to be shot in the street; or because Ramy simply did not love her like she loved him, and she’d badly mistaken his general kindness and ostentatious verve for special attention, because Letty was the kind of girl who was used to, and had come to always expect, special attention – he knew better than to tell her the truth. What Letty wanted then was not honest counsel, but someone to comfort and love her and give her, if not the attention she craved, then some facsimile of it. So he let her sob against him, soaking the front of his shirt in tears, and rubbed circles in her back as he murmured mindlessly that he didn’t understand – was Ramy a fool? What wasn’t to love about her? She was gorgeous, gorgeous, she made Aphrodite herself jealous – indeed, he intoned, she ought to feel lucky she hadn’t been turned into a mayfly already. This made Letty giggle, which stopped her crying somewhat, and that was good; that meant he’d done his job.

He had the oddest feeling of disappearing as he spoke, of fading into the background of a painting depicting a story which must have been old as history. And perhaps it was the drink, but he was fascinated by the way he seemed to drift outside himself, to watch from the awning as her hiccuping sobs and his murmurs mingled, floated, and became puffs of condensation against the cold stained-glass windows.