Robin won one night with jixin. ‘In Canton, mothers would send their sons off to the imperial exams with a breakfast of chicken hearts,’ he explained. ‘Because chicken hearts – jixin – sounds similar to jìxing, which means memory.’*
‘What would that do?’ Ramy snorted. ‘Scatter bloody chicken bits all over your paper?’
‘Or make your heart the size of a chicken’s,’ said Victoire. ‘Imagine, one moment you’ve got a normal-size heart and the next it’s smaller than a thimble, and it can’t pump all the blood you need to survive, so you collapse—’
‘Christ, Victoire,’ said Robin. ‘That’s morbid.’
‘No, this is easy,’ said Letty. ‘It’s a metaphor of sacrifice – the key is the trade. The chicken’s blood – the chicken’s heart – is what supports your memory. So you’ve only got to slaughter a chicken to the gods and you’ll pass.’
They stared at each other. It was very late, and none of them had got enough sleep. They were all presently suffering the peculiar madness of the very scared and very determined, the madness that made academia feel as dangerous as the battlefield.
If Letty had suggested they plunder a henhouse right then, none of them would have hesitated to follow.
The fated week came. They were as prepared as they could be. They’d been promised a fair exam as long as they did their work, and they had done their work. They were frightened, of course, but warily confident. These exams, after all, were precisely what they had been trained to do for the last two and a half years; no more and no less.
Professor Chakravarti’s paper was easiest of all. Robin had to translate, unseen, a five-hundred-character-long passage in Classical Chinese that Professor Chakravarti had composed. It was a charming parable about a virtuous man who loses one goat in a mulberry field but finds another. Robin realized after the exam that he’d mistranslated yànshi, which meant ‘romantic history’, as the tamer ‘colourful history’,* which missed the tone of the passage somewhat, but hoped the ambiguities between ‘sexual’ and ‘colourful’ in English would be enough to fudge things over.
Professor Craft had written a devilishly difficult paper prompt about the fluid roles of the interpretes in the writings of Cicero. They were not simply interpreters, but played a number of roles such as brokers, mediators, and occasionally bribers. Robin’s cohort were instructed to elaborate, then, on the use of language in this context. Robin scribbled an eight-page essay on how the term interpretes was, for Cicero, ultimately value neutral in comparison to Herodotus’s hermeneus, one of whom was killed by Themistocles for using Greek on behalf of the Persians. He concluded with some comments on linguistic propriety and loyalty. He was truly unsure how he’d performed when he walked out of the examination room – his mind had resorted to the funny trick of ceasing to understand what he’d argued as soon as he dotted the last sentence, but the inky lines had looked robust, and he knew he’d at least sounded good.
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. ??. Then he flipped it over. ‘Understand.’