The Memory of Babel

by Christelle Dabos

  Ophelia swiftly removed the wings from both her feet and Octavio’s, and slipped them into her pocket. Now that hostilities were open, they had to escape. Their enemies were lying in wait, somewhere within the storm. They would locate them from the slightest clatter.

  Just as she was slinging Octavio’s arm over her shoulders, a gunshot rang out. The bang echoed all around the smoke-filled courtyard, rebounding on the facades of the buildings. Ophelia didn’t think she’d been hit, but her veins were throbbing at such a pace, she was no longer sure of anything.

  “Who fired?” Fearless bellowed. “I said: await orders!”

  He was no longer laughing at all. His men’s voices protested, each one asserting that it wasn’t him. Ophelia didn’t understand what was going on, but was determined to take advantage of this diversion. She led Octavio, feeling her way forward. Still dazed, he was struggling to walk straight. She herself could see no more than three steps ahead. She was disorientated. She swallowed sand whenever she breathed in.

  A scream stopped her in her tracks; a howl of horror such as she’d never heard in all her life.

  Fearless’s voice. It ripped through the air like an explosion, eclipsing the wind and the dust. Ophelia and Octavio put their hands over their ears. The entire courtyard was now reduced to one long, never-ending scream.

  Then the voice went quiet.

  Octavio showed Ophelia a lofty form looming in the haze. The saber-toothed tiger was there, right in front of them. It was prostrate on the ground, ears flattened back, coat bristling, eyes round as two headlamps.

  Terrorized.

  Ophelia tripped on a body lying on its back. It took a few heartbeats before she recognized Fearless. The skin on his face was distorted, like an ancient mask of tragedy. His mouth screamed in silence. His bulging eyes stared at nothing.

  “Dead,” Octavio whispered.

  “Killed,” a voice behind them corrected.

  Professor Wolf suddenly appeared through the storm, eerie as a specter. He was clad all in black, his neck brace making him stiff as a cadaver, and his goatee smelt strongly of singeing. Slung across his shoulder was an old blunderbuss, the muzzle of which seemed to have exploded. It must have come from him, that gunshot.

  He handed Ophelia her frock coat, having picked it up on his way. “Follow me, you two,” he ordered between his teeth. “The person behind this could still be around. Believe me, you don’t want to meet him.”

  THE DATING

  Professor Wolf guided them through the dense haze. When Ophelia lost sight of him, she followed the crunching of his shoes. She could trust only her ears. There was not a sound, not a cry anymore, beyond the wind. What had become of Fearless’s men? Had they run away? Were they dead?

  And the killer? Was he still here, somewhere in the courtyard?

  Ophelia bit into her sleeve to stop herself from coughing. The dust was suffocating her, blinding her, deafening her . . .

  She bumped into Octavio when he suddenly stopped in front of her. The professor had led them to the wall of a building. “Climb up,” he muttered. “Quickly.”

  Ophelia saw the safety ladder that led up to the roof. She clambered up the rungs, one by one, slipping on the moss, buffeted by the squalls. The higher she got, the less thick the dust became. When she reached the final rung, she was out of breath, but breathing freely again. She helped Octavio to hoist himself up in turn; the blood seeping from his brow and nose was congealing down one side of his face.

  The roof was a vast terrace of lavender, undulating in the wind like a sea. Professor Wolf waded warily through its waves. His black clothes, hair, and goatee were like an ink stain against the surrounding colors. With his neck brace preventing him from turning his head around, he turned instead on his heels to indicate to Ophelia and Octavio to hurry up, and, at the same time, to check they weren’t being followed.

  The various roofs were linked to each other by stone arches. There was a bit of everything growing on them: rosemary trees, bay trees, lemon trees, but also nettles and creepers. Seen from the ground, the neighborhood was but a world of dust; seen from up there, it became a labyrinthine jungle.

  The professor went up some stairs leading to a raised old greenhouse. Its door was so rusty, he had to force it open with his shoulder, and he muttered many an Animist curse before successfully closing it behind them. He then blocked the entrance with his blunderbuss. The greenhouse had been invaded by weeds and flies. Rags of many colors plugged the gaps left by missing panes of glass. The wind whistled through all the cracks, but that sound felt like silence after the commotion outside.

  Ophelia collapsed onto the edge of an empty sink. She massaged her still-painful scalp; her curls had taken on dramatic proportions.

  “Are you going to tell us what . . . ”

  “Be quiet now,” Professor Wolf cut in. “I’m trying to concentrate.”

  He had pressed his eye to a telescope to observe the courtyard, which the greenhouse overlooked from high up. Ophelia peered through the dirty panes: all she could see of the world below were red whirlwinds, swelling, undulating, collapsing, and rising up again in a relentless dance. She almost couldn’t believe that they had been trapped down there just moments ago.

  She rinsed her glasses under the sink’s tap. Around her she noticed an arsenal of old weapons among the plants, as well as a camp bed, cans of food, china, and piles of books. The professor had turned this abandoned greenhouse into a bunker.

  Ophelia was concerned about Octavio’s silence. He had slumped in a corner, legs drawn up, in the middle of some ferns. Clutching his knees with both hands, he was trying to control the shaking of his fingers, which were swollen from punching. His fringe concealed his face, like a curtain.

  Ophelia looked for a container. Here, just as in Professor Wolf’s apartment, objects were as shy as those crabs that scuttle into rock cavities. She just caught hold of a tin bowl, as it tried to hide behind a cactus. She filled it to the brim with water and then, holding it down, dipped a handkerchief in it for cleaning up Octavio’s blood. He let her proceed without protest; his eyes stared at a particular spot, to one side, studiously avoiding meeting hers. All of his pride seemed to have been torn from him, along with his gold chain.

  “Thank you,” she murmured to him. “I won’t forget what you did for me.”

  Octavio’s mouth twisted into a bitter smile. “I’m not half as heroic as you suggest. I wanted to hit him the moment he stood in front of me. Vraiment wanted to. Even now that he’s dead, I still want to. Because he saw through me more clearly than my own eyes do. If my mother were to hear about what I did . . . She will hear about it,” he immediately corrected, a look of profound self-disgust etched on his face. “I’ll tell her about it myself.”

  Ophelia stared at the reddened water in the bowl, which was still resisting her grip. How many secrets, how many thoughts had she concealed from her own mother to avoid being judged? She took out the wings she’d kept in her pocket, to return them to Octavio.

  “It’s true,” she said. “You’re a good person.”

  Professor Wolf suddenly turned from the window, his telescope closing itself up with a loud click. “The Family Guard has just arrived. Someone must have alerted them. There will be an inquest that will conclude, as usual, that it was an unfortunate accident. After all, crime doesn’t exist in our lovely city.”

  Octavio looked over the ferns to give him an offended glare. His frowning instantly made his torn skin bleed again. “You’re verging on unpatriotic, professor. I won’t denounce you if you come to testify with Apprentice Eulalia and me. We must describe the events exactly as they unfolded.”

  In truth, Ophelia wasn’t that keen to do so. If she gave evidence, her identity would be checked and she’d be asked a whole lot of questions that she’d rather avoid.

  The problem vanished when Professor Wolf seized a rifle
from his collection of weapons and leveled it at his two guests.

  “You’re going nowhere,” he hissed. His weapon was as ancient as the blunderbuss that had exploded in his hands, but he didn’t seem that concerned. His charred goatee made him look fearsome. “What were you up to in front of my door? Who sent you?”

  Octavio’s complexion went from bronzed to leaden. He hadn’t flinched before Fearless because, then, violence was an abstract notion to him. He had since experienced it with his own body.

  As for Ophelia, she didn’t see the professor’s rifle. She saw only the fear lurking deep in his eyes. A fear even greater than that she had felt herself in the courtyard.

  “We came of our own volition,” she replied. “We needed your help. And I, personally, needed your forgiveness,” she added, after a sudden inspiration, “for having flouted the of readers’ professional code under your very roof. You have every right to consider me an enemy, but the reverse isn’t true.”

  Professor Wolf’s lips twitched. Although he didn’t put his rifle down, he did lower the barrel slightly. “Why would you need my help?”

  “You are the only person alive who understands what is really going on. Or who is able to speak about it, at any rate,” Ophelia specified, with a thought for Mediana. “The person who killed Mademoiselle Silence and Fearless, you’ve already encountered him, haven’t you?”

  The professor’s eyes, sharp as pistol bullets, darted from Ophelia to Octavio. “You two . . . you haven’t the slightest idea what you have just come up against. Some good advice: stop nosing around. For my part, doing so brought me only trouble. The less you know, the better off you’ll be.”

  Octavio, who had remained huddled in his corner up to now, slowly stood up, dusted down his uniform, and threw his shoulders back. “We are apprentice Forerunners. It is our duty to have the know-how and to make known.”

  Professor Wolf sniggered without loosening his grip on his rifle. There was, however, increasingly less anger in his demeanor. The muscles in his face and arms were sagging, gradually yielding under the weight of too heavy a burden.

  Ophelia decided that the time had come to carry it with him. “Have you read the books of E. G.?”

  She could feel Octavio’s eyes searing into her; it was the second time he was hearing her pipe up with this question.

  Professor Wolf clutched at his neck brace, as if Ophelia had just winded him. “How did you . . . What do you know?”

  “Little and too much, all at once. If I must be afraid, I would at least like to know why. I need to know the truth. Your truth,” she concluded, gently.

  After endless hesitation, Professor Wolf sat down on his camp bed, and laid down his rifle. He suddenly seemed terribly weary. “My truth,” he growled, still stroking his neck brace, “is that I’m a coward. Take a seat. We’re going to converse for a while.”

  Barely had he grunted these words before two garden chairs emerged from the bushes and minced forward. They were so timid, Ophelia had to sit with all her weight on hers to prevent it from retreating. At last, she was going to see the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle fitting into place.

  The professor let out a long sigh as he contemplated his black reader’s gloves. “I am a specialist in the wars of the old world. I was already one before that word was put on the Index,” he said with annoyance, seeing Octavio frown. “Maybe not a virtuoso, as you will become one day, but one of the top experts in the dating of objects. The Memorial is somewhere that has always fascinated me due to its past as a military academy. There was a time when I was allowed into the Secretarium and could read the original collections. I witnessed my discipline being steadily discredited with every new law and decree. The Lords of LUX withdrew my access overnight. Weapons, medals, witness accounts, letters,” he listed, unfurling his fingers, one by one, “all the collections relating to war were removed from the Memorial, like garbage. And then it was the turn of the books. Spy stories, crime thrillers, swashbuckling tales, they all disappeared from the shelves. A veritable purge!”

  Professor Wolf looked daggers at the two apprentices in front of him, as if they were personally responsible for these events. Ophelia understood him without being able to tell him so; the purging of her own museum had felt like an amputation to her. As for Octavio, he made no comment. From the moment he had sat in his garden chair, he had crossed both arms and legs, defensively.

  “The Memorial of today bears no comparison to the one that I haunted as a student,” Professor Wolf continued. “It became ever harder to find the resources for my research. I witnessed, impotent, the impoverishment of documentation, archives, and historical literature. In fact, it was worse than that. That accursed Acoustic . . . Mademoiselle Silence . . . Her ears followed me everywhere. The moment she heard me leafing through a work, she sent it straight to the censoring department. She watched my every move at the Memorial, as one might watch a vulture hovering over a carcass. From her point of view, if a specialist like me deemed a book worthy of interest, then that book was inevitably subversive. I spent my time avoiding her, walking on tiptoe to avoid being heard by her. And that’s how I ended up, out of pique, resorting to the children’s department.”

  A squall, stronger than the rest, shook one of the panes of the greenhouse. That was all it took for Professor Wolf to leap to his feet, rifle at the ready. His wide-open, staring eyes under his bushy black eyebrows made him look slightly mad.

  Ophelia couldn’t stop scanning the weeds surrounding them herself. She’d doubtless been affected by this man’s paranoia, but she couldn’t shake off the feeling of being watched.

  Once he realized that it was a false alarm, the professor sat back down, heavily, making the bed’s rusty springs creak. He passed his hand over a face that was haggard from insomnia, strained from anxiety.

  “I . . . I wasn’t immediately interested in E. G.’s books. Like all self-respecting young Babelians, I had clambered up the ladder forbidden to children of my age once or twice, keen to reach these tales that were stored too high up. And, finding them deadly boring, had promptly returned them to their shelf.”

  Octavio nodded, without uncrossing his arms or legs. On this point, at least, he agreed with Professor Wolf’s opinion. Faced with their shared reaction, Ophelia’s curiosity was at its zenith. “How did that change?” she asked. “What did you discover about these books that you didn’t know as child?”

  Professor Wolf grimaced as if he had just gulped curdled milk. “At first, absolutely nothing. They were still the same right-thinking stories, with the same fusty style, in the same dated language as I remembered. All those tales seemed to have been written with but one aim: praising the new world. How the twenty-one family spirits became wonderful parents of humanity!” he proclaimed, rolling his eyes. “How the arks were miraculously repopulated with their descendants! How the family powers were successfully passed on through the generations! How the ‘masters of objects,’ ‘masters of space,’ ‘masters of gravity,’ and the rest of the gang, had all appeared! How peace had replaced wars—in short, that kind of claptrap. I would never have gone any further had there not been . . . something else.”

  He swallowed under his neck brace. Hanging on his every word, Ophelia was leaning so far forward on her garden chair, she finally tipped off it.

  “If E. G.’s tales aren’t worth a bean,” Professor Wolf continued, his voice tight, “his books did intrigue me as objects. You see, we’re not talking about reprints here: they are all publications from that era, and I found them remarkably well preserved. Too well preserved, in fact. I am an expert in dating,” he reminded them, with a sarcastic grin. “I was convinced that the Memorialist who had catalogued them had made an enormous mistake. Those tales couldn’t have been printed barely a century after the Rupture, they had to be more recent! My conscientiousness told me to offer my services as a reader to the Memorial, to evaluate this collection properly. No
,” the professor murmured, more to himself than to Ophelia and Octavio, whom he no longer seemed to see. “Not my conscientiousness. My arrogance. I wanted to make them regret having so misjudged me.” He laughed, joylessly. “Not only did I receive a categorical refusal, but on top of that I attracted Mademoiselle Silence’s attention to E. G.’s books.”

  Ophelia held her breath. The jigsaw puzzle was starting to come together before her glasses. So that was why Mademoiselle Silence had tried to destroy the entire collection: due to the interest Professor Wolf had shown in it!

  “So, what did you do?” she asked.

  “The most stupid thing of my entire life. I stole a book.”

  Octavio said not a word, but his eyes reddened like embers once again. In Babel, theft was an extremely serious crime.

  Ophelia didn’t share his disapproval. “That book, do you still have it? It’s The Era of Miracles, isn’t it? Could I see it?”

  “No.”

  The professor’s response had been fast as a whip.

  “No?”

  “No, you can’t see it. No, it isn’t The Era of Miracles. No, I no longer have it in my possession. If you want to hear ‘my truth,’” he said, losing patience, “you’ll have to button it, young lady.”

  Ophelia closed her mouth to contain her questions.

  “I stole a book,” Professor Wolf reiterated. “I picked one in haste from E. G.’s collection, hid it under my jacket, and left, avoiding Mademoiselle Silence’s ears. I’d barely got home before I was appalled at what I had just done,” he muttered, looking away. “I never felt guilty about saying words that are in the Index, or collecting forbidden objects, but stealing . . . I had proved right all those Memorialists who considered me a man unworthy of being called ‘Professor.’ I thought of telegraphing Sir Henry to make amends, explain my motives to him, and denounce Mademoiselle Silence. That Lord isn’t known for being sentimental, but he has always opposed the destruction of books.”

  Ophelia swallowed her saliva with difficulty. Whenever Thorn was mentioned, she felt herself cracking even more.