Page 143 of Babel

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.

And, certainly, Letty could not have been aiming for his heart. That was also impossible. She loved him, she loved him almost like Robin loved him – she’d told him so, he remembered, and if that were true, then how could she look into Ramy’s eyes and shoot to kill?

Which meant Ramy might still be alive, might have survived against all odds, might have dragged himself from the carnage of the Old Library and found himself somewhere to hide, might yet recover if only someone found him in time, stanched the wound in time. Unlikely, but perhaps, perhaps, perhaps...

Perhaps when Robin escaped this place, when they were reunited, they’d laugh so hard over this whole thing that their ribs hurt.

He hoped. He hoped until hope became its own form of torture. The original meaning of hope was ‘to desire’, and Robin wanted with every ounce of his being a world that no longer was. He hoped until he thought he was going mad, until he started hearing fragments of his thoughts as if spoken outside of him, low, gruff words that echoed around the stone.

I wish—

I regret—

And then a flurry of confessions that weren’t his.

I wish I’d loved her better.

I wish I’d never touched that knife.

This wasn’t his imagination. He lifted his throbbing head, his cheek sticky with blood and tears. He glanced around, astonished. The stones were talking, whispering a thousand different testimonies, each too drowned out by the next for him to make out anything but passing phrases.

If only, they said.

It isn’t fair, they said.

I deserve this, they said.

And yet, amidst of all that despair:

I hope—

I hope—

I hope against hope—

Wincing, he stood up, pressed his face against the stone, and inched down the wall until he found the telltale glint of silver. The bar was inscribed with a classic Greek to Latin to English daisy-chain. The Greek epitaphion meant ‘a funeral oration’ – something spoken, something meant to be heard; the Latin epitaphium, similarly, referred to a eulogy. It was only the modern English epitaph that referred to something written and silent. The distorted translation gave voices to the written. He was surrounded by the confessions of the dead.

He sank down and clutched his head in his hands.