Page 69 of Babel

Robin stood awhile in silence, watching as Professor Chakravarti adjusted the etchings on the Ashmolean bar with a fine stylus, examined them with a lens, and then made corresponding adjustments to the resonance rod. The whole process took about fifteen minutes. At last, Professor Chakravarti wrapped the Ashmolean bar back up in velvet, returned it to his bag, and stood up. ‘That should do the trick. We’ll head back to the museum tomorrow.’

Robin had been reading the rods, noticing what a large percentage of them appeared to use Chinese match-pairs. ‘You and Professor Lovell have to maintain all of these?’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘There’s no one else who can do it. Your graduation will make three.’

‘They need us,’ Robin marvelled. It was strange to think the functioning of an entire empire depended on just a handful of people.

‘They need us so terribly,’ agreed Professor Chakravarti. ‘And it’s good, in our situation, to be needed.’

They stood together at the window. Looking out over Oxford, Robin had the impression that the whole city was like a finely tuned music box, relying wholly on its silver gears to keep running; and that if the silver ever ran out, if these resonance rods ever collapsed, then the whole of Oxford would stop abruptly in its tracks. The bell towers would go mute, the cabs would halt on the roads, and the townsfolk would freeze in motion on the street, limbs lifted in midair, mouths open in midspeech.

But he couldn’t imagine that it would ever run out. London, and Babel, were getting richer every day, for the same ships fuelled by long-enduring silver-work brought back chests and chests of silver in return. There wasn’t a market on earth that could resist British incursion, not even the Far East. The only thing that would disrupt the inflow of silver was the collapse of the entire global economy, and since that was ridiculous, the Silver City, and the delights of Oxford, seemed eternal.

One day in mid-January, they showed up at the tower to find all the upperclassmen and graduate fellows wearing black under their gowns.

‘It’s for Anthony Ribben,’ explained Professor Playfair when they filed into his seminar. He himself was wearing a shirt of lilac blue.

‘What about Anthony?’ Letty asked.

‘I see.’ Professor Playfair’s face tightened. ‘They haven’t told you.’

‘Told us what?’

‘Anthony went missing during a research expedition to Barbados last summer,’ said Professor Playfair. ‘He disappeared the night before his ship was due to return to Bristol, and we haven’t heard from him since. We’re presuming he’s dead. His colleagues on the eighth floor are quite upset; I believe they’ll be wearing black for the rest of the week. A few of the other cohorts and fellows have joined in, if you care to participate.’

He said this with such casual unconcern that they might have been discussing whether they wanted to go punting that afternoon. Robin gaped at him. ‘But isn’t he – aren’t you – I mean, doesn’t he have family? Have they been told?’

Professor Playfair scribbled an outline for that day’s lecture on the chalkboard as he answered. ‘Anthony has no family except his guardian. Mr Falwell’s been notified by post, and I hear he’s quite upset.’

‘My God,’ said Letty. ‘That’s terrible.’

She said this with a solicitous glance at Victoire, who among them had known Anthony the best. But Victoire looked surprisingly unfazed; she didn’t seem shocked or upset so much as vaguely uncomfortable. Indeed, she looked as if she hoped they might change topics as quickly as possible. Professor Playfair was more than happy to oblige.

‘Well, on to business,’ he said. ‘We left off last Friday on the innovations of the German Romantics...’

Babel did not mourn Anthony. The faculty did not so much as hold a memorial service. The next time Robin went up to the silver-working floor, a wheat-haired graduate fellow he didn’t know had taken over Anthony’s workstation.

‘It’s disgusting,’ Letty said. ‘Can you believe – I mean, a Babel graduate, and they just act like he was never here?’

Her distress belied a deeper terror, a terror which Robin felt as well, which was that Anthony had been expendable. That they were all expendable. That this tower – this place where they had for the first time found belonging – treasured and loved them when they were alive and useful but didn’t, in fact, care about them at all. That they were, in the end, only vessels for the languages they spoke.

No one said that out loud. It came too close to breaking the spell.

Of them all, Robin had assumed Victoire would be most devastated. She and Anthony had grown quite close over the years; they were two of only a handful of Black scholars in the tower, and they were both born in the West Indies. Occasionally he’d seen them talking, heads bent together, as they walked from the tower to the Buttery.

But he never once saw her cry that winter. He wanted to comfort her, but he did not know how, especially as it seemed impossible to broach the topic with her. Whenever Anthony was brought up, she flinched, blinked rapidly, and then tried very hard to change the subject.

‘Did you know Anthony was a slave?’ Letty asked one night in hall. Unlike Victoire, she was determined to raise the issue at every opportunity; indeed, she was obsessed with Anthony’s death in a way that felt uncomfortably, performatively righteous. ‘Or would have been. His master didn’t want him freed when abolition took effect, so he was going to take him to America, and he only got to stay at Oxford because Babel paid for his freedom. Paid. Can you believe it?’

Robin glanced to Victoire, but her face had not changed one bit.

‘Letty,’ she said very calmly, ‘I am trying to eat.’