Professor Lovell’s paper involved two prompts. The first was a challenge to translate three pages of a children’s nonsense alphabet rhyme (‘A is for the apricot, which was eaten by a Bear’) into a language of their choosing. Robin spent fifteen minutes trying to match Chinese characters ordered by their romanizations before giving up and going the easy route, which was just to do it all in Latin. The second page contained an Ancient Egyptian fable told through hieroglyphs and its accompanying English translation with the instructions to identify as best they could, with no prior knowledge of the source language, the difficulties in conveying it into the target language. Here, Robin’s facility with the pictorial nature of Chinese characters helped greatly; he came up with something about ideographic power and subtle visual implications and managed to get it all down before time ran out.
The viva voce was not as bad as it could have been. Professor Playfair was as harsh as promised, but still an incorrigible showman, and Robin’s anxiety dissipated as he realized how much of Playfair’s loud condescension and indignation was for theatrics. ‘Schlegel wrote in 1803 that the time was not so far away that German would be the speaking voice of the civilized world,’ said Professor Playfair. ‘Discuss.’ Robin had fortunately read this piece by Schlegel in translation, and he knew Schlegel was referring to the unique and complex flexibility of German, which Robin proceeded to argue was an underestimation of other Occidental languages such as English (which Schlegel accused in that same piece of ‘monosyllabic brevity’) and French. This sentiment was also – Robin recalled hastily as his time ran out – the grasping argument of a German aware that the Germanic empire could offer no resistance to the increasingly dominant French, and who sought refuge instead in cultural and intellectual hegemony. This answer was neither particularly brilliant nor original, but it was correct, and Professor Playfair followed up on only a handful of technicalities before dismissing Robin from the room.
Their silver-working test was scheduled for the last day. They were instructed to report to the eighth floor in thirty-minute increments – Letty first at noon, then Robin, then Ramy, then Victoire at half past one.
At half past noon, Robin walked up all seven flights of the tower and stood waiting outside the windowless room at the back of the southern wing. His mouth was very dry. It was a sunny afternoon in May, but he couldn’t stop the shivering in his knees.
It was simple, he told himself. Just two words – he needed only to write down two simple words, and then it would be over. No cause for panic.
But fear, was, of course, not rational. His imagination ran wild with the thousand and one things that could go wrong. He could drop the bar on the floor, he could suffer a lapse of memory the moment he walked through the door, or he could forget a brush stroke or spell the English word wrong despite practising both a hundred times. Or it could fail to work. It could simply fail to work, and he would never get a position on the eighth floor. It could all be over that quickly.
The door swung open. Letty emerged, pale-faced and shaking. Robin wanted to ask her how it had gone, but she brushed past him and hurried down the stairs.
‘Robin.’ Professor Chakravarti poked his head out the door. ‘Come on in.’
Robin took a deep breath and stepped forward.
The room had been cleared of chairs, books, and shelves – anything valuable or breakable. Only one desk remained, in the corner, and that was bare save for a single blank silver bar and an engraving stylus.
‘Well, Robin.’ Professor Chakravarti clasped his hands behind his back. ‘What do you have for me?’
Robin’s teeth were chattering too hard for him to speak. He hadn’t known how debilitatingly scared he would be. The written exams had involved their fair share of shakes and retching, but when it came down to it, when his pen hit parchment, it felt routine. It had been nothing more and nothing less than the accumulation of everything he’d practised for the past three years. This was something else entirely. He had no idea what to expect.
‘It’s all right, Robin,’ Professor Chakravarti said gently. ‘It’ll work. You’ve just got to focus. It’s nothing you won’t do a hundred times in your career.’
Robin took a deep breath and exhaled. ‘It’s something very basic. It’s – theoretically, metaphorically, I mean, it’s a bit messy, and I don’t think it’ll work—’
‘Well, why don’t you walk me through the theory first and then we’ll see.’
‘Míngbai,’ Robin blurted. ‘Mandarin. It means – so it means, “to understand”, right? But the characters are loaded with imagery. Míng – bright, a light, clear. And bai – white, like the colour. So it doesn’t just mean to understand, or to realize – it has the visual component of making clear, to shine a light on.’ He paused to clear his throat. He was not quite so nervous anymore – the match-pair he’d prepared did sound better when he spoke it out loud. In fact, it seemed halfway plausible. ‘So – now this is the part I’m not very sure about, because I don’t know what the light will be associated with. But it should be a way of making things clear, of revealing things, I think.’
Professor Chakravarti gave him an encouraging smile. ‘Well, why don’t we see what it does?’
Robin took the bar in trembling hands and positioned the tip of the stylus against the smooth, blank surface. It took an unexpected amount of force to make the stylus etch out a clear line. This was, somehow, calming – it made him focus on keeping the pressure steady instead of the thousand other things he could do wrong.
He finished writing.
‘Míngbai,’ he said, holding up the bar so that Professor Chakravarti could see. 明白. Then he flipped it over. ‘Understand.’
Something pulsed in the silver – something alive, something forceful and bold; a gale of wind, a crashing wave; and in that fraction of a second Robin felt the source of its power, that sublime, unnameable place where meaning was created, that place which words approximated but could not, could never pin down; the place which could only be invoked, imperfectly, but even so would make its presence felt. A bright, warm sphere of light shone out of the bar and grew until it enveloped them both. Robin had not specified what sort of understanding this light would signify; he had not planned that far; yet in that moment he knew perfectly and, from the look on Professor Chakravarti’s face, his supervisor did too.
He dropped the bar. It stopped glowing. It lay inert on the desk between them, a perfectly ordinary hunk of metal.
‘Very good,’ was all Professor Chakravarti said. ‘Will you retrieve Mr Mirza?’
Letty was waiting for him outside the tower. She’d calmed significantly; the colour had returned to her cheeks, and her eyes were no longer wide with panic. She must have just dashed to the bakery up the street, for she held a crumpled paper bag in her hands.
‘Lemon biscuit?’ she asked as he approached.
He realized he was starving. ‘Yes please, thanks.’
She passed him the bag. ‘How’d it go?’
‘All right. It wasn’t the precise effect I wanted, but it was something.’ Robin hesitated, biscuit halfway to his mouth, not wanting to celebrate nor elaborate in case she’d failed.
But she beamed at him. ‘Same. I just wanted something to happen, and then it did, and oh, Robin, it was so wonderful—’
‘Like rewriting the world,’ he said.