Page 110 of Babel

‘Say her name, you coward.’

‘Robin.’

This was a warning. This was where his father drew the line. Everything Robin had done until now might still be forgiven, if he only backed down; if he only made his apologies, bent to authority, and returned to naive, ignorant luxury.

But Robin had been bending for so long. And even a gilded cage was still a cage.

He stepped forward. ‘Father, say her name.’

Professor Lovell pushed his chair back and stood.

The origins of the word anger were tied closely to physical suffering. Anger was first an ‘affliction’, as meant by the Old Icelandic angr, and then a ‘painful, cruel, narrow’ state, as meant by the Old English enge, which in turn came from the Latin angor, which meant ‘strangling, anguish, distress’. Anger was a chokehold. Anger did not empower you. It sat on your chest; it squeezed your ribs until you felt trapped, suffocated, out of options. Anger simmered, then exploded. Anger was constriction, and the consequent rage a desperate attempt to breathe.

And rage, of course, came from madness.*

Afterwards, Robin wondered often if Professor Lovell had seen something in his eyes, a fire he hadn’t known his son possessed, and whether that – his startled realization that his linguistic experiment had developed a will of his own – had prompted Robin in turn to act. He would try desperately to justify what he’d done as self-defence, but such justification would rely on details he could hardly remember, details he wasn’t sure whether he’d made up to convince himself he had not really murdered his father in cold blood.

Over and over again he would ask himself who had moved first, and this would torture him for the rest of his days, for he truly did not know.

This he knew:

Professor Lovell stood abruptly. His hand went to his pocket. And Robin, either mirroring or provoking him, did the same. He reached for his front pocket, where he kept the bar that had killed Eveline Brooke. He was not imagining what the bar might do – of this he was certain. He spoke the match-pair because they were the only words that came to mind to describe this moment, its immensity. He thought of Professor Lovell’s poker cracking over and over against his ribs as he lay curled on the library floor, too startled and confused to cry out. He thought of Griffin, poor Griffin, spirited to England at a younger age than he’d been; chewed up and thrown away because he didn’t remember enough of his native tongue. He thought of the listless men in the opium den. He thought of his mother.

He was not thinking of how the bar would claw apart his father’s chest. Some part of him must have known, of course, because words only activated the bars if you meant them. If you only uttered the syllables, they had no effect. And when he saw the character in his mind, saw the grooves etched in shining silver, and spoke the word and its translation out loud, he must have thought of what it would do.

Bào: to explode, to burst forth with what could no longer be contained.

But it was not until Professor Lovell fell to the floor, until the heady, salty scent of blood filled the air, that Robin realized what he’d done.

He dropped to his knees. ‘Sir?’

Professor Lovell did not stir.

‘Father?’ He grasped Professor Lovell’s shoulders. Hot, wet blood spilled over his fingers. It would not stop; it was everywhere, an endless fountain gushing out of that ruin of a chest.

‘Die?’

He did not know what made him say it, the word for father. Perhaps he thought it would stun Professor Lovell, that the shock alone would bring him back to life, that he could yank his father’s soul back to his body by naming the one thing that they had never named. But Professor Lovell was limp, gone, and no matter how hard Robin shook him the blood would not stop pouring.

‘Die,’ he said again. Then a laugh escaped his throat; hysterical, helpless, because it was so very funny, so apt that the romanization of father contained the same letters for death in English. And Professor Lovell was so clearly, incontrovertibly dead. There was no walking back from this. There could be no more pretending.

‘Robin?’

Someone banged at the door. Dazed, without thinking, Robin stood and unlatched it. Ramy, Letty, and Victoire came tumbling in, a babble of voices – ‘Oh, Robin, are you—’; ‘What’s happening—’; ‘We heard shouting, we thought—’

Then they saw the body and the blood. Letty let out a muffled shriek. Victoire’s hands flew to her mouth. Ramy blinked several times, then uttered, very softly, ‘Oh.’

Letty asked, very faintly, ‘Is he...?’

‘Yes,’ Robin whispered.

The cabin went very silent. Robin’s ears were ringing; he brought his hands to his head, then immediately lowered them, for they were bright scarlet and dripping.

‘What happened...?’ Victoire ventured.

‘We quarrelled.’ Robin could barely get the words out. He was struggling now to breathe. Black pressed in at the edges of his vision. His knees felt very weak, and he wanted badly to sit down, only the floor was drenched in a spreading pool of blood. ‘We quarrelled, and...’

‘Don’t look,’ Ramy instructed.

No one obeyed. They all stood frozen in place, gazes locked on Professor Lovell’s still form as Ramy knelt beside him and held two fingers against his neck. A long moment passed. Ramy murmured a prayer under his breath – ‘Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi Raji’un’ – and then moved his hands over Professor Lovell’s eyelids to push them closed.

He exhaled very slowly, pressed his hands against his knees for a moment, then stood up. ‘What now?’