Page 26 of Babel

‘Eighth floor. Up at the very top.’

‘For the view?’ Letty asked.

‘For the fires,’ said Anthony. ‘When fires start you’d rather they be at the top of the building so everyone has time to get out.’

No one could tell if he was joking.*

Anthony led them up another flight of stairs. ‘The third floor is the landing base for the live interpreters.’ He gestured around the largely empty room, which showed few signs of use except for several stained teacups lying askew and the occasional stack of paper on a desk corner. ‘They’re almost never here, but they need a place to prepare briefing files in confidence when they are, so they get this entire space. They accompany dignitaries and foreign service officials on their trips abroad, attending balls in Russia and taking tea with sheikhs in Arabia and whatnot. I’m told all the travel gets quite exhausting, so there aren’t too many career interpreters who come out of Babel. They’re usually natural polyglots who picked up their languages elsewhere – they had missionary parents, or they spent summers with foreign relatives, for example. Babel graduates tend to avoid it.’

‘Why?’ Ramy asked. ‘It sounds fun.’

‘It’s a cushy posting if what you want is to travel abroad on someone else’s money,’ said Anthony. ‘But academics by nature are a solitary, sedentary lot. Travel sounds fun until you realize what you really want is to stay at home with a cup of tea and a stack of books by a warm fire.’

‘You have a dim view of academics,’ said Victoire.

‘I have a view informed by experience. You’ll understand in time. Alums who apply for interpreting jobs always quit within the first two years. Even Sterling Jones – Sir William Jones’s nephew, mind you – couldn’t hack it for more than eight months, and they had him travelling first class wherever he went. Anyway, live interpretation isn’t considered all that glamorous, because all that really matters is that you get your basic points across without offending anyone. You don’t get to play around with the intricacies of language, which is of course where the real fun is.’

The fourth floor was a good deal busier than the third. The scholars also appeared to be younger: messy-haired and patch-sleeved types compared with the polished, well-dressed folks in Legal.

‘Literature,’ Anthony explained. ‘That is, the businesses of translating foreign novels, stories, and poems into English and – less frequently – vice versa. It’s a bit low on the prestige rung, to be honest, but it’s a more coveted placement than interpretation. One considers a postgraduation appointment to Literature the natural first step towards becoming a Babel professor.’

‘Some of us actually like it here, mind you.’ A young man wearing postgraduate gowns strode up next to Anthony. ‘These are the first years?’

‘That’s all of them.’

‘Not a big class, are you?’ The man waved cheerfully at them. ‘Hello. Vimal Srinivasan. I’ve just graduated last term; I do Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, and German.’*

‘Does everyone here introduce themselves with their languages?’ Ramy asked.

‘Of course,’ Vimal said. ‘Your languages determine how interesting you are. Orientalists are fascinating. Classicists are dull. Anyhow, welcome to the best floor in the tower.’

Victoire was peering around the shelves with great interest. ‘So do you get your hands on every book that’s published abroad?’

‘Most of them, yes,’ said Vimal.

‘All the French releases? As soon as they come out?’

‘Yes, greedy,’ he said, with absolutely no malice. ‘You’ll find our book-buying budget is effectively limitless, and our librarians like to maintain a thorough collection. Though we can’t translate everything that comes through here; we just haven’t the manpower. Translating ancient texts still occupies a good part of our time.’

‘Which is why they’re the only department that runs a deficit every year,’ said Anthony.

‘Bettering one’s understanding of the human condition is not a matter of profit.’ Vimal sniffed. ‘We’re always updating the classics – between the past century and now, we’ve become a lot better at certain languages, and there’s no reason why classics should remain so inaccessible. I’m currently working on a better Latin version of the Bhagavad Gita—’

‘Never mind that Schlegel just put one out,’ Anthony quipped.

‘Over ten years ago,’ Vimal dismissed. ‘And the Schlegel Gita is dreadful; he said himself that he hadn’t grasped the basic philosophy that underlies the whole thing. Which shows, because he’s used about seven different words for yoga—’

‘Anyway,’ Anthony said, ushering them away, ‘that’s Literature. One of the worst applications of a Babel education, if you ask me.’

‘You don’t approve?’ Robin asked. He shared Victoire’s delight; a life spent on the fourth floor, he thought, would be wonderful.

‘Me, no.’ Anthony chuckled. ‘I’m here for silver-working. I think the Literature Department are an indulgent lot, as Vimal knows. See, the sad thing is, they could be the most dangerous scholars of them all, because they’re the ones who really understand languages – know how they live and breathe and how they can make our blood pump, or our skin prickle, with just a turn of phrase. But they’re too obsessed fiddling with their lovely images to bother with how all that living energy might be channelled into something far more powerful. I mean, of course, silver.’

The fifth and sixth floors housed both instruction rooms and reference materials – the primers, grammars, readers, thesauruses, and at least four different editions of every dictionary published in what Anthony claimed was every language spoken in the world.

‘Well, the dictionaries are really scattered all over the tower, but here’s where you come if you need to do some archival heavy lifting,’ Anthony explained. ‘Right in the middle, you see, so no one ever has to walk more than four flights to get what they need.’

In the centre of the sixth floor, a series of red-bound books sat on crimson velvet cloth beneath a glass display case. The way the soft lamplight gleamed against their leather covers made them look quite magical – more like magicians’ grimoires than common reference materials.