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

One day Robin would ask himself how his shock had turned so easily to rage; why his first reaction was not disbelief at this betrayal but black, consuming hatred. And the answer would elude and disturb him, for it tiptoed around a complicated tangle of love and jealousy that ensnared them all, for which they had no name or explanation, a truth they’d only been starting to wake up to and now, after this, would never acknowledge.

But just then, all he knew was red blurring out the edges of his vision, crowding out everything but Letty. He knew now how it felt to truly want a person dead, to want to tear them apart limb by limb, to hear them scream, to make them hurt. He understood now how murder felt, how rage felt, for this was it, the intent to kill he ought to have felt when he killed his father.

He lunged at her.

‘Don’t,’ Victoire cried. ‘She’s—’

Letty turned and fled. Robin rushed after her just as she retreated behind a mass of constables. He pushed against them; he didn’t care about the danger, the truncheons and guns; he only wanted to get through to her, wanted to wring the life from her neck, to tear the white bitch to pieces.

Strong arms wrenched him back. He felt a blunt force against the small of his back. He stumbled. He heard Victoire screaming but couldn’t see her past the tangle of constables. Someone threw a cloth bag over his head. He flailed violently; his arm struck something solid, and the pressure against his back let up so slightly, but then something hard connected against his cheekbone, and the explosion of pain was so blinding it made him go limp. Someone cuffed his hands behind his back. Two sets of hands gripped his arms, hoisted him up, and dragged him out of the Reading Room.

The struggle was over. The Old Library was quiet. He shook his head frantically, trying to shake the bag off, but all he caught were glimpses of overturned shelves and blackened carpet before someone yanked the bag tighter over his head. He saw nothing of Vimal, Anthony, Ilse, or Cathy. He could no longer hear Victoire’s screaming.

‘Victoire?’ he gasped, terrified. ‘Victoire?’

‘Quiet,’ said a deep voice.

‘Victoire!’ he shouted. ‘Where—’

‘Quiet, you.’ Someone pulled the hood away just long enough to stuff a rag in his mouth. Then he was plunged back into darkness. He saw nothing, heard nothing; just bleak, awful silence as they pulled him out of the ruins of the Old Library and into a waiting cab.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Thou was not born for death, immortal Bird!

No hungry generations tread thee down.

JOHN KEATS, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’

Bumpy cobblestones, painful jostles. Get out, walk. He obeyed, unthinking. They pulled him from the carriage, tossed him in a cell, and left him to his thoughts.

Hours or days might have passed. He couldn’t tell – he had no sense of time. He was not in his body, not in this cell; he curled miserably on the stone tiles and left the bruised and aching present behind. He was in the Old Library, helpless, watching over and over as Ramy jerked and lurched forward like someone had kicked him between the shoulder blades, as Ramy lay limp in his arms, as Ramy, despite everything he tried, did not stir again.

Ramy was dead.

Letty had betrayed them, Hermes had fallen, and Ramy was dead.

Ramy was dead.

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 was bleeding, but he didn’t know where from. He ached all over from the handcuffs digging into his wrists, from the hard stone floor against his limbs, from the way the police had flung him down as if trying to break all of his bones. He registered these hurts as factual, but he could not really feel them; 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.

He was stuck in the past. He revisited that memory a thousand times, the same way he had revisited his father’s death. Only this time instead of convincing himself he had not intended to kill, he tried to convince himself of the possibility Ramy was alive. Had he really watched Ramy die? Or had he only heard the gunshot, seen the burst of blood and the fall? Was there breath left in Ramy’s lungs, life left in his eyes? It seemed so unfair. No, it seemed impossible that Ramy could just leave this world so abruptly, that he could be so alive one moment and so still the next. It seemed to defy the laws of physics that Ramiz Rafi Mirza could be silenced by something so tiny as a bullet.