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

Anxiety hit him properly midafternoon. What had last night seemed like such a thrilling, righteous mission now seemed incredibly stupid. He couldn’t focus on Latin; Professor Craft had to snap her fingers in front of his eyes before he realized she’d asked him three times over to scan a line. He kept imagining horrible scenarios with vivid detail – how the constables would burst in, point, and yell, There he is, the thief; how his cohort would stare, stunned; how Professor Lovell, who was for some reason both prosecutor and judge, would coldly sentence Robin to the noose. He imagined the fireplace poker, coming down again and again, cold and methodical, snapping every single one of his bones.

But the visions remained only that. No one came to arrest him. Their class proceeded slowly, blandly, uninterrupted. His terror faded. By the time Robin and his cohort reassembled in hall for supper, he found it astonishingly easy to pretend to himself that last night had never happened. And once they were seated with their food – cold potatoes and steak so tough it took all their might to hack off chewable bits – laughing at Professor Craft’s irritated corrections of Ramy’s embellished translations, it indeed felt like only a distant memory.

A new note awaited him under the windowsill when he returned home that night. He unfolded it with shaking hands. The message scrawled within was very brief, and this time Robin managed to decode it in his head.

Await further contact.

His disappointment confused him. Hadn’t he spent the day wishing he’d never been ensnared in this nightmare? He could just imagine Griffin’s mocking voice – What, did you want a pat on the back? A biscuit for a job well done?

He now found himself hoping for more. But he had no way of knowing when he might hear from Griffin again. Griffin had warned Robin their contact would be sporadic, that entire terms might pass before he was in touch again. Robin would be summoned when he was needed, and no sooner. He found no note at his windowsill the next evening, or the evening after that.

Days passed, and then weeks.

You’re still a Babel student, Griffin had told him. Act like one.

It turned out this was very easy to do. As the memories of Griffin and Hermes receded into the back of his mind, into nightmares and the dark, his life at Oxford and at Babel rose to the forefront in glaring, dazzling colour.

It stunned him, how quickly he fell in love with the place and the people. He hadn’t even noticed it happening. His first term had him spinning in place, dazed and exhausted; his classes and coursework formed a rote pattern of frenzied readings and late, bleary-eyed nights against which his cohort was his only source of joy and solace. The girls, bless them, quickly forgave Robin and Ramy for their first impressions. Robin discovered he and Victoire shared the same unabashed love of literature of all kinds from Gothic horrors to romances, and they took great pleasure in swapping and discussing the latest batch of penny dreadfuls brought in from London. And Letty, once she’d been persuaded the boys were indeed not too stupid to be at Oxford, became a great deal more tolerable. She turned out to possess both an acerbic wit and a keen understanding of the British class structure by virtue of her upbringing, which made for infinitely amusing commentary when it wasn’t aimed at either of them.

‘Colin’s the sort of bottom-feeding middle-class leech who likes to pretend he’s got connections because his family knows a mathematics tutor in Cambridge,’ she would say after a visit to Magpie Lane. ‘If he wants to be a solicitor, he could just get an apprenticeship at the Inns of Court, but he’s here because he wants the prestige and connections, only he’s not half charming enough to acquire them. He’s got the personality of a wet towel: damp, and he clings.’

At this point she would do an impression of Colin’s wide-eyed, oversolicitous greetings while the rest of them roared with laughter.

Ramy, Victoire, and Letty – they became the colours of Robin’s life, the only regular contact he had with the world outside his coursework. They needed each other because they had no one else. The older students at Babel were aggressively insular; they were too busy, too intimidatingly brilliant and impressive. Two weeks into the term Letty boldly asked a graduate fellow named Gabriel if she might join the French reading group, but was swiftly rejected with the particular disdain only the French could muster. Robin tried to befriend a Japanese third-year student named Ilse Dejima,^* who spoke with a faint Dutch accent. They crossed paths often on their ways in and out of Professor Chakravarti’s office, but the few times he tried to say hello to her she made a face as if he were mud on her boots.