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

‘But I’m a murderer,’ he said, then said it again, because the words were so absurd that the very act of forming the vowels felt bizarre. ‘I took a life. With full deliberation, with full intent – I knew what the bar would do to him and I threw it, and I watched it break his body, and in the moment before I regretted it, I was satisfied with what I had done. It wasn’t an accident. It doesn’t matter how much I wish I could take it back now – I wanted him dead, and I killed him.’ He took a shuddering breath. ‘Am I – what kind of person do you have to be to do that? A villain. A blackhearted wretch. How else does that happen, Ramy? There’s no in-between. There’s no rule under which this is forgivable, is there?’

Ramy sighed. ‘Whoever takes a life – it will be as if they killed all humanity. So says the Qu’ran.’

‘Thanks,’ Robin muttered. ‘That’s comforting.’

‘But the Qu’ran also speaks of Allah’s infinite mercy.’ Ramy was quiet for a moment. ‘And I think . . . well, Professor Lovell was a very bad man, wasn’t he? You acted in self-defence, didn’t you? And the things he did to you, to your brother, to your mothers . . . perhaps he did deserve to die. Perhaps the fact that you killed him first prevented unforetold harm from coming to others. But that’s really not your decision to make. That’s God’s.’

‘Then what do I do?’ Robin asked miserably. ‘What do I do?’

‘There’s nothing you can do,’ said Ramy. ‘He’s dead, you killed him, and there’s nothing you can do to change that except pray to God for forgiveness.’ He paused, tapping his fingers against his knee. ‘But the question now is how to protect Victoire and Letty. And your turning yourself in doesn’t do that, Birdie. Neither does your torturing yourself about your worth as a human being. Lovell’s dead, and you’re alive, and perhaps that’s what God willed. And that’s as much comfort as I can offer.’

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.

Ramy’s favourite way of panicking was to voice all his anxieties in extravagant, incredibly specific detail. ‘Someone will go to his cabin,’ he declared. ‘They’ll need to ask him a question – something inane, something about the arrival date or about payment for passage. Only he won’t be there, and they’ll ask us about it, and finally somebody will get suspicious and they’ll search the whole ship, and we’ll pretend we’ve no idea where he’s gone either and they won’t believe us, and then they’ll find the bloodstains—’

‘Please,’ Victoire said. ‘Please, for the love of God, stop.’

‘Then they’ll send us to Newgate,’ Ramy continued, intoning grandly as if narrating an epic poem, ‘and St Sepulchre’s bell will ring twelve times, and a great crowd will gather outside, and the next morning we’ll be hanged, one by one . . .’

The only way to get Ramy to stop was to let him finishing narrating the entire sick fantasy, which he always did, with more and more ludicrous descriptions of their executions every time. They actually brought Robin some relief – it was relaxing, in a way, to imagine the very worst that could happen, since it took the terror out of the unknown. But it only ever set Victoire off. Whenever these conversations occurred, she’d be unable to sleep. Then it would be her turn to lose her head, and she’d nudge them awake at four in the morning, whispering that she felt bad about keeping Letty up, and they would have to sit above deck with her, whispering inane stories about whatever came to mind – birdsong, Beethoven, departmental gossip – until the gentle reprieve of dawn.

Letty’s bad spells were the hardest to deal with. For Letty, alone among them, did not understand why Ramy and Victoire had come so readily to Robin’s defence. She assumed they’d protected Robin because they were friends. The one motive she understood was that she’d seen Professor Lovell seize Robin’s collar in Canton, and abusive fathers was something she and Robin had in common.

But since she saw Professor Lovell’s death as an isolated incident, not the tip of an iceberg, she was constantly trying to fix their situation. ‘There have to be ways to come clean,’ she kept saying. ‘We can say Professor Lovell was hurting Robin, that it was self-defence? That he’d lost his mind from stress, that he began it all, and that Robin was only trying to get away? We’d all testify, it’s all true, they’d have to acquit him – Robin, what do you think?’

‘But that’s not what happened,’ said Robin.

‘But you could say it’s what happened—’

‘It won’t work,’ Ramy insisted. ‘It’s too dangerous, and more, it’s a risk we absolutely don’t need to take.’