Page 187 of Babel

‘We’re going to try.’ Robin’s chest felt very tight. He was so exhausted; he wanted to curl up on the ground and go to sleep. He wanted this to be over. ‘But I can’t tell you more tonight. I just need you to go.’

Abel thrust out his arm. ‘Then this, I suppose, is goodbye.’

‘Goodbye.’ Robin grasped his palm and shook it. ‘Oh – and the blankets, I forgot—’

‘Think nothing of it.’ Abel wrapped his other hand over Robin’s. His grip was so warm, solid. Robin felt a catch in his throat; he was grateful that Abel was making this easy, that he hadn’t forced him to justify himself. He had to go swiftly, resolute to the very end.

‘Good luck, Robin Swift.’ Abel squeezed his hand. ‘God be with you.’

They spent the hours before dawn arranging hundreds of silver bars into pyramids at vulnerable points around the tower – around the base supports, beneath the windows, along the walls and bookshelves, and in veritable pyramids around the Grammaticas. They could not predict the scope, the scale, of the destruction, but they would prepare for it as well as they could, would make it near impossible to salvage any material from the remains.

Victoire and Yusuf left an hour after midnight. Their farewells were brief, constrained. It was an impossible parting; there was too much and yet nothing to say, and there was a sense that everyone was holding back for fear of opening the floodgates. If they said too little, they would regret it forever. If they said too much, they’d never bring themselves to part.

‘Safe travels,’ Robin whispered, embracing Victoire.

She choked out a laugh. ‘Yes. Thank you.’

They clung to each other for a long time, long enough that at last, once everyone had left to give them privacy, they were the only two standing in the lobby. Finally she stepped back, glanced round, eyes darting back and forth as if she was unsure whether to speak.

‘You don’t think this will work,’ said Robin.

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘You’re thinking it.’

‘I’m just terrified that we’ll make this grand statement.’ She lifted her hands, let them fall. ‘And they’ll see it only as a temporary setback, something to recover from. That they’ll never understand what we meant.’

‘For what it’s worth, I don’t think they were ever going to listen.’

‘No, I don’t think they were.’ She was crying again. ‘Oh, Robin, I don’t know what to—’

‘Just go,’ he said. ‘And write to Ramy’s parents, will you? I just – they ought to know.’

She nodded, gave him one last, tight squeeze, and then darted out the door to the green where Yusuf and Abel’s men were waiting. One last wave – Victoire’s stricken expression under the moonlight – and then they were gone.

Then there was nothing to do but wait for the end.

How did one make peace with one’s own death? According to the accounts of the Crito, the Phaedo, and the Apology, Socrates went to his death without distress, with such preternatural calm that he refused multiple entreaties to escape. In fact, he’d been so cheerfully blasé, so convinced that dying was the just thing to do, that he beat his friends over their heads with his reasoning, in that insufferably righteous way of his, even as they burst into tears. Robin had been so struck, upon his first foray into the Greek texts, by Socrates’s utter indifference to his end.

And surely it was better, easier to die with such good cheer; no doubts, no fears, one’s heart at rest. He could, in theory, believe it. Often, he had thought of death as a reprieve. He had not stopped dreaming of it since the day Letty shot Ramy. He entertained himself with ideas of heaven as paradise, of green hills and brilliant skies where he and Ramy could sit and talk and watch an eternal sunset. But such fantasies did not comfort him so much as the idea that all death meant was nothingness, that everything would just stop: the pain, the anguish, the awful, suffocating grief. If nothing else, surely, death meant peace.

Still, facing the moment, he was terrified.

They wound up sitting on the floor in the lobby, taking comfort in the silence of the group, listening to each other breathe. Professor Craft tried, haltingly, to comfort them, surveying her memory for ancient words on this most human of dilemmas. She spoke to them of Seneca’s Troades, of Lucan’s Vulteius, of the martyrdom of Cato and Socrates. She quoted to them Cicero, Horace, and Pliny the Elder. Death is nature’s greatest good. Death is a better state. Death frees the immortal soul. Death is transcendence. Death is an act of bravery, a glorious act of defiance.

Seneca the Younger, describing Cato: una manu latam libertati viam faciet.*

Virgil, describing Dido: Sic, sic iuvat ire sub umbras.*

None of it really sank in; none of it moved them, for theorizing about death never could. Words and thoughts always ran up against the immovable limit of the imminent, permanent ending. Still, her voice, steady and unflinching, was a comfort; they let it wash over their ears, lulling them in these final hours.

Juliana glanced out of the window. ‘They’re moving across the green.’

‘It’s not dawn,’ said Robin.

‘They’re moving,’ she said simply.

‘Well then,’ said Professor Craft, ‘We’d better get on with it.’