The Memory of Babel

by Christelle Dabos

  The further they advanced into the building, followed by the silent procession of automatons, the louder the noise became.

  Ophelia recognized the checkerboard floor and elegant, low wardrobes of Ambrose’s dressing room. It was right here that he had presented her with a toga, as worn by the powerless. To her great surprise, the noise wasn’t coming from a mechanical washing machine, but from a drawer. It was shaking violently, as if trying to escape from its chest.

  “It might be my bag,” Ophelia whispered, hesitantly. “I didn’t have it in my possession for long, but I could have animated it without realizing it.”

  “Just one way to find out.”

  Thorn took out a handkerchief with which to hold the knob of the drawer, as if germs were a more fearsome life form than anything this piece of furniture might contain. Ophelia jumped when something leapt out of the drawer and wound itself around Thorn’s arm. Her first, utterly terrifying thought was that it was an enormous snake. Her second, perfectly incredulous thought, was that it was a knitted snake.

  Thorn didn’t flinch. With his hand still gripping the knob of the drawer, he carefully studied the creature strangling his arm with its three-colored coils. “It’s definitely not your bag. It’s your scarf.”

  “I had lost it.” The words fell from Ophelia’s lips like stones. She stared at the scarf that was clinging to Thorn. It was definitely the one she had knitted, stitch by stitch, the one she had animated, day by day, and yet she couldn’t accept its tangible presence here, right before her. “I had lost it,” she said, again.

  Cautiously, she stretched out her hand. The scarf immediately unwound itself from Thorn’s arm to wind itself around hers, and then wrapped itself around her neck with a sulky possessiveness. It was only when she felt that familiar weight that Ophelia fully realized that, no, the scarf wasn’t roaming the city’s gutters, and, yes, they were finally reunited. The guilt that had been burning inside her for months rose to her mouth tasting of salt. She buried her nose in the scarf.

  “I had lost it,” she repeated, her voice muffled.

  Her joy was immediately tempered. How had Ambrose gained possession of her scarf? And why had he hidden it in his chest of drawers? Couldn’t he have returned it to her? Sent her a telegram, at least, to reassure her? The more Ophelia tried to understand it, the less she was able to. The trust she’d so readily given him, the hurt she’d felt when he had begun to avoid her, all that was starting to disintegrate inside her chest.

  Thorn observed her, sternly, and finally said out loud what she didn’t want to put into words:

  “This Ambrose, are you sure he’s definitely a friend?”

  “You should leave.”

  Thorn and Ophelia turned around. A wheelchair, surrounded by a throng of automatons, was silhouetted in the doorway. Ambrose approached with a mechanical purr. The play of shadow and light in the dressing room accentuated the strangeness of his body, with its reverse symmetry, the dazzling whiteness of his clothes, and the velvety darkness of his face.

  His inverted hands were convulsively gripping the wheelchair’s armrests. “Leave”

  Ophelia swallowed with difficulty. It wasn’t an order. It was an entreaty that Ambrose was addressing to her, and to her alone. His voice had become so beseeching that she no longer had any idea what she was supposed to feel.

  She tugged on the scarf to uncover her mouth. “I came to fetch my bag. But what has happened to you? I don’t recognize you anymore.”

  Ambrose’s antelope eyes widened. The day they had met, he had shown only a kindly curiosity toward Ophelia. Now, he was looking at her as if she were the most improbable thing he had ever seen.

  “What has happened to me is that you are not who you claim to be.”

  Ophelia’s heart skipped a beat. How had he seen through her deception? Was it the scarf that, in one way or another, had betrayed her?

  Her embarrassment must have been written all over her face because Ambrose looked profoundly disappointed. “So, I wasn’t mistaken. From the first moment, I detected in you . . . But, all the same, I didn’t think . . . ” He went quiet, breathed in slowly, and then repeated with infinite gentleness: “You must leave, mademoiselle. Je vous en prie.”

  “Or what?”

  Thorn had spoken this question without losing his calm, but his eyes were as Polar as his accent. Ophelia tensed. If he was no longer speaking as Sir Henry, it meant that a line had just been crossed. The atmosphere of distrust hovering in the dressing room made the stuffiness of the place even more suffocating.

  “Or it will end very badly,” Ambrose replied. His fine features contorted with pain as he implored Ophelia with his eyes. “In any case,” he added, in a tense whisper, “it can only end very badly. After all, mademoiselle, it is you who will cause the disintegration of the arks.”

  Ophelia’s glasses blanched on her nose. The last person to have addressed those words to her was . . .

  Thorn let out an exasperated snort. “I’m going to save us some time. You are in the service of God, aren’t you?”

  Barely had he uttered that last sentence before all the automatons, who, until then, had just been standing around behind the wheelchair, were on the march. In a slow procession, they took over the dressing room, surrounding Thorn, Ambrose, and Ophelia, and then linked hands like children—large children with no mouth, nose, or eyes—to form a ring around them. The moment the circle was closed, there was a flash of steel that made Ophelia’s scarf shudder. Dozens, hundreds of sharp blades had just burst through the mannequins’ clothes. What little humanity they had possessed had disappeared: they were now nothing but an impenetrable barrier of thorns. A trap.

  Ambrose rested his elbows awkwardly on his chair. “That is most regrettable,” he sighed. “You should not have said that.”

  “Call them off,” Thorn ordered.

  Ophelia shot him an anxious look. He had neither raised his voice nor made a move, but so clenched were his fingers around the knob of his stick that their knuckles had gone white. His claws felt threatened and he was doing his best to contain them. The dressing room wasn’t spacious enough for him to distance himself from Ophelia and Ambrose without skewering himself on the automatons’ blades.

  “Ambrose, please,” Ophelia intervened. “I know you don’t want to do us any harm. Call off your servants and give me back my bag.”

  The adolescent shook his head with an unhappy expression. “I cannot, mademoiselle.”

  Ophelia felt her skin bristle as if lightning were about to strike. Thorn seemed to be tightening every muscle in his body to prevent the Dragons’ power from bursting forth. His claws would have no effect on the automatons, but they could cut up both her and Ambrose like paper.

  “Call them off,” Ophelia insisted, drilling her eyes into Ambrose’s desperate face.

  “He cannot.”

  The voice that had just sung out those two words echoed through the building’s colonnades. It was as light as the flutter of a butterfly.

  Lazarus’s voice.

  “But I can. Fall out, garçons!”

  The instant this command was issued, the automatons withdrew their weapons with a metallic clatter, broke up their ring, and left at a calm pace.

  Lazarus stood on the threshold. He took off his huge top hat, creating a silvery waterfall of hair as he bowed.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Thorn, I’m delighted to welcome you to my home! If you had waited for me at the Memorial, I would have happily offered you a lift in my aircraft. Please follow me to the drawing room,” he suggested, putting his hat back on with a theatrical flourish, “we are going to have a most interesting chat!”

  THE NAME

  Lazarus’s teaspoon tinkled musically in his porcelain cup as it stirred the sixth sugar he had plopped into his tea. The tip of his tongue poked out between his teeth. He looked like a studious schoolboy.
The old man’s ways made him unintentionally amusing.

  He didn’t make Ophelia feel like laughing whatsoever.

  Sitting on the very edge of the sofa, with the scarf snuggling possessively between her arms, she touched neither the tea nor the macaroons that Walter, the mechanical butler, served her. She could feel Ambrose’s distraught eyes on her; his lips had remained sealed since his father’s return. From the corner of her glasses, she checked Thorn to know what tactic to adopt. He was sitting stiffly among the profusion of cushions on the sofa, gripping the knob of his stick, which he had planted between his legs like a sword, and never taking his eyes off Lazarus. He had regained control of his claws, but they were still lying in wait, on the surface of his nerves, ready to lash out at the first false move. For Ophelia, merely sitting close to him prevented her migraine from completely lifting. When Thorn, in turn, was served a cup of tea by Walter, he promptly tipped the contents into the pot of a rubber plant.

  “Come, come, I would never poison my guests under my own roof!” Lazarus commented, with amusement. “I can’t even squash a mosquito without feeling frightfully guilty.”

  Silence descended again, thick as tar. Ambrose was watching Ophelia who was watching Thorn who was watching Lazarus.

  “Bien!” the last exclaimed, making his cup chime against its saucer. “I’m going to lay my cards on the table. Yes, I know you-know-who, and yes, I’ve been working for him for some time. I was a young aspiring virtuoso when I encountered him for the first time. En fait, to be accurate, it’s he who came to recruit me. It was an experience that was . . . how can I describe it?” With his little finger, Lazarus pushed his pink spectacles onto the bridge of his nose as he searched for the right word. “Disconcerting. A bit like suddenly discovering that I had a twin brother. You-know-who appeared to me with my own face, my own voice, my own uniform—the very one you’re wearing today, young demoiselle,” he pointed out, with a knowing wink at Ophelia. “He graciously furnished me with considerable means to enable me to fulfill my dreams of exploring the world. He asked me for just a single, trifling thing in return . . . La barbe!”

  Walter had poured him more tea, making his cup overflow and boiling-hot liquid spill over his fine white trousers.

  “What in return?” Ophelia encouraged him.

  Forgetting the tea burn, Lazarus broke into a beaming smile as he leaned emphatically forward on his pouffe. His eyes, his lenses, his teeth, and the golden tip of his nose glinted in the half-light of the room. This old man had the vitality of a young man. Ambrose, serious and still in his wheelchair, seemed the older of the two. For a father and son, they weren’t very alike.

  “Something extrêmement simple in return,” Lazarus confided, an excited tremor in his voice. “I had to look.”

  “Look at what?”

  “Whatever I deemed worthy of interest, young demoiselle! And since I deem absolutely everything worthy of interest, I have spent every second of the rest of my life looking on Go— on you-know-who’s behalf.”

  Carried away by his own enthusiasm, Lazarus had stopped himself just in time. He looked around to reassure himself that the automatons, who were dusting the nooks and crannies of the drawing room, weren’t moving back into their circle of blades. He then pulled a notebook, triumphantly, from his frock coat, waving it like a magician’s wand. “I wrote notes on my travels! So many notes that they could rival the miles I covered on all my peregrinations.”

  In other words, Ophelia thought, stroking her scarf in an effort to stay calm, this man was God’s pawn. The situation was not looking good. She glanced furtively at the large bay window, which the drawing-room lamps had turned into a mirror. It reflected all four of them, five if one included Walter’s faceless form. If God had no reflection, it was at least comforting to note that neither Ambrose nor Lazarus were imposters right now.

  “A mere handful of years later, you-know-who returned to see me,” Lazarus continued, after noisily downing a gulp of his tea. “He entrusted me with a new mission, and new means to carry it out. An extrêmement tricky mission. To find the unfindable LandmArk! Or, failing that, to find an Arkadian. The only one I almost encountered,” he sighed, looking regretful, “is poor Mademoiselle Hildegarde. It would seem she disappeared in highly dubious circumstances.”

  “She self-destructed.”

  Ophelia turned her glasses up at Thorn, who had just spoken these words. His razor-blade profile revealed nothing, but in the pause that followed there hovered an unspoken accusation: she self-destructed because of you, because you harassed her, because God coveted her family power, and because she preferred to sacrifice herself rather than render him more harmful than he already is.

  With his white-gloved fingers, Lazarus stroked his beardless chin.

  “A mighty sad exit for so brilliant an architect. I still can’t understand how the situation could have taken such a turn . . . If at least I had managed to see her, speak to her, I certainly would have been able to convince her of the validity of our enterprise. You see,” Lazarus gushed, joining his hands as though in prayer, “you-know-who is much more than the father-creator of the family spirits and the new humanity. He seeks neither glory nor gratitude. He aspires to just one thing: to become the incarnation of each one of you. Even I who am but a powerless person, I was touched to the soul by the beauty of his work, by the greatness of his cause! My birth dictates that I will never, alas, belong to his big and beautiful family, but I will use all my energy to make this world—his world—even more parfait! And so what if the Lords of LUX don’t deem me worthy of joining their ranks. As long as they are satisfied with my automatons, and help me to combat the servitude of man by man, I’m a fulfilled citizen!”

  Lazarus expressed himself as if each word sparkled on his tongue. Ophelia was struck by both his sincerity and his credulity. As for her, a single encounter with God had sufficed for her to have no intention of ever putting herself at his service. She observed Ambrose on the sly to gauge whether he was as indoctrinated as Lazarus, but the adolescent was staring into the amber surface of his tea in profound melancholy. His father’s presence seemed to negate his own.

  “Since we’ve mentioned LUX,” Lazarus then added, giving Thorn’s gilded uniform a telling look, “what the devil did you do to become one of them? The last time I heard of you, you were a disgraced Treasurer of the Pole, and here you are today, a Lord of Babel!”

  Thorn shrugged his shoulders. “I have an assignment from the Genealogists. Address your questions to them.”

  Ophelia admired the ease with which he covered up his nervousness. It wouldn’t have been wise to reveal that he had allied himself with the Genealogists in order to thwart God, after all that Lazarus had just told them.

  “Sapristi, that’s the last thing I’d do!” the latter guffawed, polishing his spectacles on his frock coat. “My level of initiation is nowhere near theirs. The Genealogists are not permitted to reveal what they know to me, and the same goes for me. Without wishing to offend you, Mr. Thorn, Sir Henry, or whatever your name is, my main concern, anyway, is for the fate of your companion.”

  Ophelia clenched her hands in her scarf, one end of which was whipping the air like the ruffled tail of a cat. Lazarus put his spectacles back on with a dramatic flourish to shoot a rose-tinted look at her. Just one word from him, and all the automatons in the house, maybe even in the city, would turn into a prison of thorns. Or worse. As her migraine intensified, Ophelia understood that Thorn’s claws were ready to go on the offensive should the situation so demand.

  “And in what way does my fate concern you?” she asked.

  Lazarus leaned so far forward, he knocked his knees on the copper tray of the tea table. “In your opinion, young demoiselle, why did you-know-who ask me, from one day to the next, to find Arkadians? Why does he urgently need to possess their mastery of space today? Don’t see this as a reproach on my part, but it’s because
of you. Because you shattered the fragile equilibrium of our world,” he explained, with a benevolent smile. “And you-know-who will do all in his power to resto . . . ”

  “Don’t denounce her.” All heads, including Walter’s faceless one, turned toward Ambrose. He had spoken in an impulsive, barely audible whisper. His chin was so drawn in, his turban threatened to topple onto his knees, and his hand shook around the cup his lips hadn’t touched. Judging by his wide-eyed stare, he was the first to be shocked at having interrupted his father. “Don’t denounce her,” he repeated, all the same. “She . . . she helped me. I promised myself to help her in return.”

  Ophelia felt as if a weight had lifted from her chest only to end up deep in her stomach. She had helped him? Did Ambrose mean that time she had freed his wheelchair from the cobbles?

  “My scarf. You purposely looked for it?”

  Ambrose nodded without looking away from his cup. “It seemed to be very important to you, mademoiselle. During your trial period at the Good Family, I questioned the tram guards. I had to insist a bit. I finally discovered that your scarf had been deposited at the lost-property office. I imagine it must have been panicked at losing you; because it wasn’t being . . . eh bien . . . very cooperative, the employee had placed it under seal. A fine had to be paid to retrieve it. I wanted to return it to you, I assure you, along with your bag, in fact.”

  Ambrose finally looked up at Ophelia, and then subtly glanced at his father. “There was an unforeseen event. I thought it best to hide your belongings until I found a solution.”

  “Sapristi!” Lazarus cried out, with a big, quizzical smile. “Am I the unforeseen event, Ambrose? Is it my return to the house that . . . ? It was clear to me that you weren’t quite yourself these past few months, but if I’d had any idea! Why not have simply explained it to me . . . Just a minute,” he broke off, suddenly, staring at Ambrose and Ophelia in turn with an increasingly flabbergasted expression. “This young demoiselle, who do you think she is, exactement?”