The Memory of Babel

by Christelle Dabos

  Ophelia raised her eyebrows and Thorn frowned even more with his. Long seconds of silence ensued, during which a night wind lifted all the mosquito nets from the windows, carrying with it the song of the frogs and the heady scent of the lily pools.

  “She who will cause the disintegration of the arks,” Ambrose finally whispered, in a high-pitched voice. “That ‘Other’ you have so often spoken to me about, Father.”

  Lazarus leaned with both hands on the tea table, spilling spices, milk jug, and sugar bowl in spectacular fashion. He began to peer at Ophelia with intense curiosity over the top of his spectacles, as if he wanted a view of her that wasn’t rose-tinted.

  “Well I never,” he said, “that’s darned interesting!”

  “I am not the Other,” Ophelia protested.

  “She is not the Other,” Thorn growled.

  “You are not the Other?” Ambrose asked, with astonishment.

  “She is not, en effet,” Lazarus asserted, with total conviction. “But she is the one who released him. She bears the indelible mark, and I am dismayed not to have noticed it for myself,” he said, punctuating each syllable with a gleeful slap on the copper top of the table. “You, too, are inverted!”

  He scrutinized Ophelia from head to toe, as if she were a major archaeological find. She wasn’t sure whether to feel flattered or insulted. Thorn pressed the steel-tipped end of his stick against Lazarus’s chest to make him move back again; his fiery outbursts were sorely testing Thorn’s claws. Obediently, Lazarus sat back down on his pouffe, while still staring avidly at Ophelia.

  “I am one myself!” he announced proudly to her. “Have you never heard of situs transversus, young demoiselle? It’s the name doctors give for anatomies like mine. It’s certainly not as obvious as in my son’s case,” he said, patting Ambrose’s deformed hand on the armrest of the wheelchair, “but if you could see inside my body, you would observe that all my internal organs are reversed. My heart is on the right, my liver on the left, and so on. I was born like that. In releasing the Other from the mirror, your symmetry inverted itself, in a certain way, n’est-ce pas?”

  Ophelia nodded, cautiously. Thorn took out his fob watch, which was getting restless, and opened its cover to remind them of the time. This was all well and good, but it still didn’t tell them where the bag was. Soon the event at the Memorial would be over, and the Genealogists were expecting the book that would make them God’s equals.

  “We’re the same!” Lazarus proclaimed, with gusto. “You, me, my son, we are peas in a pod! This idiosyncrasy of ours makes all three of us extrêmement receptive to . . . to certain things. I’m not surprised you became such an excellent reader. Ambrose has amazing sensitivity, and I, without wishing to boast, I have intuitions that make me an authentic visionary. Did you know that the left-handed were once persecuted?” he asked, out of the blue. “They were called ‘sinister’ due to the perception that people had—that we have—of the universe that surrounds us! Thank goodness, they are no longer persecuted today. You will even be amazed to learn, young demoiselle, that here in Babel, we have an institution that specializes in cases such as ours.”

  “The Deviations Observatory,” Ophelia said, her heart lurching.

  “Oh, you already know of it?”

  “I went there once. They even have a file on me. Well, on Eulalia. They deem me to be interesting.”

  “Bien sûr! You are interesting!” Lazarus was speaking so passionately that his long silver hair was becoming messier by the minute. He was looking at Ophelia as if stifling the irresistible urge to dance with her.

  “Where is this digression leading us, exactly?” Thorn asked, as his watch snapped its cover as a stern reminder.

  “It’s no kind of digression. En fait, we are right at the very crux of our ‘problem,’” Lazarus said, miming the quotation marks with his fingers. “After all, I’m sure you would like to know whether or not I am going to speak about you two to God. My loyalty to him would compel me to send a telegram to him on the spot, but I’m starting to think that maybe that won’t be necessary.”

  “Er . . . Father?” Ambrose timidly interrupted him.

  Lazarus hadn’t noticed, but at the mention of “God,” all the automatons in the room had dropped their feather dusters to move toward them.

  “La barbe!” Lazarus cursed. “Back to your work, you lot! Not my best invention,” he admitted with an exasperated sigh, as each one returned to its place. “It’s the only solution I found to ensure that certain secrets don’t leave my house. As I was saying to you,” he resumed, instantly recovering his smile, “I am not totally obliged to hand you over to you-know-who. His main priority, and consequently mine, too, is to find the Other. Now, young demoiselle, you are linked to this Other, and, sooner or later, you are bound to cross his path again. Personally, I am convinced that you are more likely to succeed in doing that in time if no one is keeping you on a tight rein.”

  Ophelia looked deep into the woolly folds of her scarf to hide the anger darkening her glasses. Lazarus was speaking to her of her shared destiny with the Other, and of the disintegration of the world, as if they were irrefutable facts. To her knowledge, no ark had been reported missing. Ophelia could barely remember that night when she had released the creature from the mirror; she sometimes even found herself thinking that she had dreamed it. This old fool was making them waste untold time over what were perhaps merely ravings!

  An old fool who commandeered an army of automatons.

  When Ophelia looked up at Lazarus, her glasses had regained all their transparency. “That’s agreed,” she said, trying her best to ignore Thorn tensing up beside her. “We will help you to find the Other, on the condition that you leave us free to follow our own initiatives. For now, please be so kind as to return my bag to me and loan us your aircraft.”

  Lazarus burst into such fits of laughter that his huge top hat toppled backwards. “Formidable! You can count on my total cooperation. Ambrose, would you go and fetch what this young demoiselle is asking you for? Walter!” he shouted at his butler, while stretching his own legs like two springs. “Let’s go and get the Lazaropter ready for our new partners!”

  Ophelia had to admit, as she saw them suddenly leaving the drawing room, that she had been expecting tougher negotiations. If Lazarus took her at her word, without demanding any guarantee from her, then he was as naive as he seemed to be.

  The moment they were alone, Thorn collapsed against the back of the sofa, as if his long spine refused to support him a second longer. When he unclenched his fingers, one by one, from his stick, Ophelia saw that the form of the knob had imprinted itself on his skin. He winced when he tried to stretch his leg out a few inches, causing a clattering of steel and one bolt to drop off.

  “Are you in pain?” Ophelia asked, with concern.

  “I didn’t save you from the Genealogists just for you to strike a deal with Lazarus.”

  “He seems neither very fearsome nor very informed. He doesn’t even know what we really came to his house to find.”

  As she said these words, Ophelia wasn’t, however, as relieved as she would have liked to be. For one moment, she had almost believed that it had been Lazarus who had gone for Professor Wolf, Mademoiselle Silence, Mediana, and Fearless. If he had nothing to do with this series of attacks, the real threat remained unidentified.

  “The Genealogists are eminently corruptible egocentrics,” Thorn said. “Lazarus is an idealist who places the wider interest above his own. He won’t be as easy to manipulate as you think.”

  “I secured an aircraft from him. Don’t underestimate me.”

  This was clearly said tongue-in-cheek, but Ophelia was taken aback by Thorn’s deadly seriousness as he looked down at her. “I will never underestimate you.”

  In one gulp, Ophelia downed all the tea she had avoided until then, unconcerned at spilling some on the scarf
, which shook itself, furiously. The tea was cold, but it helped to get rid of the lump that had suddenly lodged in her throat. Who would think of making such a declaration with such seriousness? She felt more intimidated now, on the cushions of this sofa, with Thorn’s knee brushing against hers, than she had when faced with all the automatons’ blades.

  When she looked up from her cup, Thorn was looking away. He was studying the patterns on the carpet with inordinate interest. Since they had left the Memorial, something unspoken had hovered between them and she couldn’t quite put her finger on it.

  “You warned me earlier that we had to talk, you and I.”

  “Yes,” Thorn concurred, stiffly. “It will, indeed, be necessary.”

  “I’d really like to know what it’s ab . . . ”

  “Your bag, mademoiselle.” Ambrose had just reappeared, accompanied by a mechanical whirr. “I’m so sorry to have avoided you the way I did,” he muttered. “I’d so convinced myself that you were the Other, I thought it was for the best. I . . . I hope we will remain friends?”

  After all that had just been said in this house, Ophelia’s thoughts were too muddled to give him an honest answer. She didn’t, in any case, get the chance. The piercing look Thorn shot at Ambrose prompted the latter to reverse his wheelchair to the other end of the drawing room.

  Ophelia took a deep breath before releasing the straps on her bag. Inside it she found her little grey dress, her winter boots, the sparkling-water siphon, some moldy biscuits, and the postcard her great-uncle had given her before her hasty departure from Anima.

  Then she pulled out a book for children with a crimson cover and gilded lettering:

  CHRONICLES OF THE NEW WORLD

  THE ERA OF MIRACLES

  WRITTEN AND PRINTED IN THE CITY-STATE OF BABEL

  E. G.

  Ophelia couldn’t stop the slight tingling in her fingers, despite her gloves, as she opened this book that had engendered such covetousness and such misfortune. On the flyleaf she found the Memorial’s stamp. She was no paper expert like Aunt Rosaline, but she was intrigued at the book being so well preserved. It was hard to believe that it dated from before the Rupture. Did it possess the same mysterious properties as the mirror hanging inside the globe of the Secretarium?

  As she glanced at the opening lines, she wasn’t surprised that she could recite them off by heart:

  Once upon a tomorrow,

  before too long,

  there will be a world that will finally live in peace.

  At that time,

  there will be new men

  and there will be new women.

  It will be the era of miracles.

  Ophelia turned the pages, one after another, with an undeniable sense of familiarity, as if she had already leafed through them on numerous occasions in the past. She didn’t need to read the story to remember it. Now she recalled that it was divided into twenty short tales, and that each one related the birth of a new family: the masters of objects, the masters of minds, the masters of animals, the masters of magnetism, the masters of vegetation, the masters of transmutation, the masters of charm, the masters of divination, the masters of lightning, the masters of the senses, the masters of thermalism, the masters of tellurism, the masters of the winds, the masters of mass, the masters of metamorphosis, the masters of temperature, the masters of hallucination, the masters of phantomization, the masters of empathy, and the masters of space.

  Twenty families, twenty powers.

  The tales were just as Octavio and Professor Wolf had described them. Deadly boring. Once one had accepted the revolutionary concept that E. G. had managed to anticipate the advent of the new world at a time when the arks didn’t yet exist, his stories in themselves were of no more interest.

  There were no instructions to be found for elevating oneself to God’s level.

  Ophelia was seized by a dreadful, a horrifying doubt. She handed the book to Thorn, trying hard not to reveal her panic to him. “Maybe . . . maybe the information we seek is coded?”

  Thorn didn’t respond, entirely focused on the pages he was photographing with his eyes, as he rapidly flicked past them with his thumbs. Once he had reached the end of the book, he remained bowed on the sofa for a long while, rigid as the brace on his leg, before slowly, very slowly turning his aquiline nose toward Ophelia. She suddenly seemed to have become a source of total bafflement to him.

  “I think you should read carefully right to the end,” he suggested to her, in a voice she’d never heard from him before.

  Ophelia pushed her glasses up on her nose to take a good look at the last page, on which she hadn’t noticed, due to the ink having faded so much there, a small handwritten inscription:

  “As we await better days, my dear children.

  Eulalia Gonde.”

  Ophelia kept reading and rereading these few words until every particle of her being was imbued with them.

  Eulalia Gonde.

  Gonde.

  God.

  Curiously, she didn’t feel in the least surprised. She knew it. She had always known it, and she wondered how she could have forgotten something so totally fundamental. The day Archibald had asked her to pick a name for her false identity papers, Eulalia had come spontaneously to her lips. Eulalia, the woman whose memory she shared, that reflection from the past she had seen in the hanging mirror. She saw herself once again, in her seat, tapping away energetically on her typewriter, inventing countless stories for children between one crumpled handkerchief and the next.

  Eulalia was God. Or rather, God had once been Eulalia, before the Rupture. A little storyteller with a mispronounced surname. That didn’t explain either why Ophelia shared her memories or how Eulalia Gonde had managed to create the family spirits, smash the world to pieces, and become, over the centuries, an almost omnipotent Milliface, but it did finally explain how a simple book could enable anyone to become God’s equal.

  “Because it is he who is anyone’s equal,” Ophelia murmured, stroking the handwritten inscription.

  As she was closing The Era of Miracles, still shaken by the stirring of her memory, she sensed, at the edge of her glasses, eyes that were staring at them, Thorn and her, with utmost attention. Eyes that she finally recognized. The individual who had terrified Professor Wolf, Mademoiselle Silence, Mediana, and Fearless was right there in the drawing room, right now.

  He had never stopped being there.

  Leaning on the back of Ambrose’s wheelchair, Lazarus gave them a big smile.

  “The loaned aircraft for sir and madame awaits!”

  THE TERROR

  Ophelia made not a sound as Lazarus, almost dancing, led them between the lily pools. She was pressing Eulalia Gonde’s book to her stomach to stifle her trembling. Despite it being a muggy night, it felt as if her blood had turned to ice. She tried to put on a front, but the scarf sensed her fear and was gripping her neck.

  Thorn, absorbed in his own thoughts, banged the ground with his stick with renewed resolve. Ophelia would have liked to scream to him that the killer was among them, but she would have hastened their downfall. No. It was imperative that she held her nerve. Looked straight ahead. Didn’t arouse suspicion. A plan—unreasonable, full of holes, but still a plan—was slowly but surely coming together in her mind.

  “Are you alright, mademoiselle?” Ambrose asked, politely. He was maneuvering his wheelchair to remain on her right side, his sweet face looking up at her as if desperately seeking her forgiveness. Ophelia merely nodded.

  She was reassured to see Lazarus leaping up the steps of a terrace, the tails of his frock coat flapping like wings. Thorn followed him laboriously, one step at a time, unable to bend his brace at the knee. There was no ramp to access the terrace; Ambrose wouldn’t be able to come with them. Not easily, at least. When Ophelia gave him a parting glance from the top of the steps, the adolescent’s dark
skin and the wood of his wheelchair were subsumed into the darkness of the gardens. Only his white clothes stood out against the shadows, creating the illusion that a ghost was sitting there, in midair.

  Ophelia’s plan might work.

  The “Lazaropter” awaited them on the marble terrace. It was a machine that, with its rotary wings and metal structure, looked, in the lamplight, like the skeleton of a giant dragonfly. Walter was bringing a gangway up to it. The aircraft’s propellers produced such gusts of wind that Ophelia felt the air slapping her cheeks and blowing her curls in all directions. She took a deep breath to brace herself and handed The Era of Miracles to Thorn as he was making for the gangway.

  “The truth we’ve discovered,” she said to him, loudly enough to be heard over the hum of the propellers, “it’s probably not what the Genealogists would like to hear.”

  “I don’t care. I’ve fulfilled my part of the contract.” As he seized the book, Thorn closed his fingers firmly around Ophelia’s and looked deep into her eyes. The wind, spiking up his hair, made him look even fiercer than normal. “You don’t intend to accompany me to the Memorial,” he stated. “Why?”

  Ophelia’s lies had been piling up since her arrival in Babel, often out of necessity, sometimes for simplicity’s sake, but if there was one person in the world with whom she wanted to be totally transparent, it was the man facing her right now. And yet, looking him straight in the eye, she brazenly lied to him: “I want to talk with Ambrose. We need to clear up certain things, him and me. In any case, you weren’t planning on introducing me to the Genealogists, were you?”

  Thorn’s fingers squeezed hers even harder. Did he suspect her of not telling him what she was really thinking?