In the dark, p.16
In the Dark, page 16
When we walked into the analysis room, Comrade Jin and a couple of his people were autopsying a radio intercept and they had already picked out a couple of words from the message in front of them: PLA, recover, exercise … They had already autopsied twenty-seven messages, but there were nearly a thousand waiting for them. When I was chatting with Comrade Jin, I happened to mention that Huang Yiyi was already a professor, and that she had transferred in at senior level, so she was actually earning more than I was. When Comrade Jin heard that he was amazed, and staring at Huang Yiyi he asked, ‘How old are you?’
‘Pretty ancient,’ she said.
‘You look very young to me.’
She laughed. ‘Really? Do you know why I look so young?’ Comrade Jin was just about to say something, but she didn’t wait for him to speak. ‘That’s my secret, and I’m not telling you!’ Then she walked away shaking her head, leaving Comrade Jin standing there, not knowing what to do.
When I came out she said mysteriously to me, ‘Do you want to know why I look so young? I can tell you.’
I glanced at her sideways. ‘Or you could not tell me.’
‘Oh, I want to tell you. It’s because I have love. You know, women need to experience love, because if they don’t have it they get old.’
‘Right now,’ I said, ‘you need to love your cipher – because if you can’t crack it, your hair is going to turn white!’
‘What’s the hurry? You’ve only got twenty-seven corpses for me to look at, and if you want me to love my cipher right at this minute, it would be rather like asking me to make love to an under-age boy, which is a crime.’
She was like that – always putting things in such a peculiar way – though actually she did have a point. I remembered that Anderov had said very much the same thing to me: if you’re dealing with a high-level cipher, it’s better to think about it rather than try to lift the cover too early.
‘Can you please be a little more careful about your choice of words!’ I said. ‘You shouldn’t always be joking around and speaking in such a peculiar way, particularly not with your subordinates. You need to think of the effect that your words are going to have, and not crack all these jokes.’
‘But I want to make them laugh, so that they feel I’m easy to get on with.’
‘You’re devious; not at all easy to get on with.’
‘And you’re a moron.’
‘Listen to me! If you keep talking to them in this free and easy way, they’re going to think you’re stupid and frivolous.’
‘You’re the one that’s stupid. What do you mean by giving me a woman assistant? As the proverb says, when men and women work together neither side gets tired. There are loads of men here, and you have to find me a little girl. I know what you’re up to: you’re trying to make me feel old and ashamed of myself so that I spend less time on having fun.’
‘From this point on you’re going to have to stop that. There aren’t any men here, or any women.’
‘Well, in that case, if you’re not a man and I’m not a woman, then we don’t have to make a fuss about preserving the proper segregation between the sexes.’ As she spoke she reached out to take my hand in a very intimate way, scaring me so much that I snatched my hand away and leapt back. She saw how alarmed I looked, and burst out laughing. Her carefree, open laughter floated through the quiet mountain valley. I just wished the ground would open up and swallow me.
14
I had been told that Chen never ate lunch – not because he had a poor appetite, but because he wanted to keep his head clear. If you are hungry, the deductive capabilities of your mind are comparatively dynamic, whereas if you have eaten your fill it is easy to become dozy. When people said in the past that eating modestly makes your mind better, that must be what they meant. Comrade Chen, Chen Erhu, was a workaholic, and when he was trying to crack a cipher, he often really made himself suffer. I wished that Huang Yiyi was like that. Or to put it another way, I was worried that she wasn’t like that. She hadn’t burnt her bridges. As Anderov would say, ‘God is just when he creates each individual: clever people lack application, intellectuals like their ivory towers, people capable of doing amazing things turn out not to have the patience.’ Someone like Einstein is the exception that proves the rule: God let him have everything, with none of the usual checks and balances. I felt that Huang Yiyi was naturally very gifted, with an unusual mathematical ability. Someone like that is born to crack ciphers, but she was too fond of having fun, and that’s a real problem if you want to do great things.
I could understand and make allowances for her, but Comrade Chen couldn’t bear it, and wasn’t about to put up with it. So the working relationship between the two of them started to go wrong, becoming increasingly awkward and acrimonious. I found out later from Comrade Zha that one day when Huang Yiyi came in to work she gave her a bunch of autopsied radio intercepts and said that they had just come from the analysis room, and that she should look at them immediately and then hand them on to Comrade Chen. Huang Yiyi just flicked through them and handed them back to Comrade Zha, telling her to give them to Comrade Chen.
Little Comrade Zha looked at her in alarm. ‘Aren’t you going to read them?’
‘There’s no point,’ she said. ‘I’m waiting until we have enough material, then I’ll look at them.’ As she spoke she picked up the newspaper beside her and started leafing through it. She wasn’t expecting that the minute the intercepts had been handed over, Comrade Chen would arrive in person. When Huang Yiyi opened the door and saw him, she refused to allow him in, saying, ‘Hey, stop right there: whatever it is, I will come to you.’ When she came out she told Chen with a laugh, ‘Only men are allowed into your cryptography room, and only women are allowed into mine. If you want to talk to me we will do so in Comrade Zha’s office.’
He was stunned and a very ugly expression came over his face, but he followed her into Comrade Zha’s office, where he waved the intercepts and said, ‘Have you looked at all of these?’
‘I leafed through them.’
‘This is primary data; you need to read through them carefully.’
‘I have looked at them.’
‘But just now didn’t you say that you had leafed through them?’
She was still smiling. ‘Bureau Chief Chen, I know you’re doing this for my own good, but you’re also showing off your power as one of the senior people here.’
‘This isn’t about power – this is about a sense of responsibility. Look, I’ll give them back to you and you can look at them properly.’
She didn’t take the documents. ‘No. Comrade Chen, if you want to read them, then read them yourself. Right now I’m looking at the papers and I really don’t have time for this.’
Chen raised his voice. ‘I insist that you read them, OK! Comrade Huang, the two of us are now in the same boat, and we sink or swim together. I hope that in future we will be able to join forces rather than fighting each other.’
She smiled. ‘Comrade Chen, maybe you don’t want to hear this, but cryptography is like writing a diary – whether you write a lot or a little, whether you write well or badly, it’s all up to you. You don’t need to worry about me. Quite honestly, even though we’re on the same side, we’re not going to be joining forces; in fact we can’t join forces.’
Comrade Chen just stood there, as if something was choking him; and for a very long time he didn’t say anything. Of course later on, when he insisted on coming to find me to complain about her, what could I say? All my bets were on Huang Yiyi, and I really didn’t like listening to Comrade Chen criticize her, but I couldn’t show it. I calmed him down: she came here because Director Tie gave her a military order to do so, and the fact that she dared to come at all meant that she must have good reason to believe that she could pull it off. We needed to give her time. Time would tell us what kind of person she was, what she could do, what she wanted to do, and so on … In fact, it was all waffle.
Fortunately I didn’t have to wait too long before Huang Yiyi started to make her presence felt.
That morning, the report on the analysis of the commercial encryption machine that we had brought back from headquarters came out, and I immediately told Comrade Fei to take it over to Comrade Jiang, and tell him to find out how it worked and then write a report. That afternoon I went to the calculations room several times, but they hadn’t yet completed their work. I was in a hurry, so I asked Comrade Jiang if it would be possible to get a result before we all went home. Comrade Jiang said that there was no way – there was far too much to do, and even if they all worked overtime it would still take until tomorrow morning. I just had to be patient and let them do their work, and the following morning I would see the results.
The next morning when I got to work, Comrade Jiang – who had been up all night – brought me three copies of the results, a really thick heap. I had a quick look and then handed over the two spare copies to Comrade Fei and told him to give one each to Chen and Huang Yiyi. He was to tell them to look at this immediately and that when they had finished we would be having a meeting to discuss the situation.
The report was very long, and the data therein both complex and abstruse, and so it was very slow reading for me. But Huang Yiyi finished it quickly and came rushing in to find me. When she saw I was still reading through the report she said angrily, ‘Don’t look! Don’t look! There is nothing to read. Sivincy is a cow!’
I told her to sit down and explain what she meant, and at the same time I got Comrade Fei to call Chen in to hear what she had to say. She was almost bouncing up and down in her chair, desperate to speak. I told her to wait until Chen arrived. She didn’t pay any attention, but started in: ‘It’s a scandal, that’s what it is. I am quite sure now that the reason the Americans didn’t use DIFFICULT CENTURY themselves but gave it to the Taiwanese was because they found out what a nasty trick Sivincy had pulled, and started to have their doubts about her character. If people start worrying about the character of the person writing ciphers for them, is it likely they’re going to use them? Particularly not when she has Soviet bones under her nice new American skin!’
What she said confused both me and Comrade Chen, who had arrived in the middle of it all, and we just looked at her blankly.
‘What I want to say is very simple,’ she explained. ‘Both of you have worked in cryptography for so long that I’m sure you’re well aware that during the Second World War the Germans used a famous cipher called ULTRA.’
‘The Enigma machine,’ I said.
‘Yes, Enigma.’
‘Enigma I know about,’ Chen said. ‘It was the world’s first electro-mechanical encryption device.’
‘Yes. In the world of cryptography people talk about ULTRA, because that was the name given to the cipher they used. But the machine those messages were created on was called Enigma, so it’s all the same thing.’
I smiled and said to Chen, ‘Just like you: your name is Chen Erhu but at work everyone calls you Bureau Chief Chen; it’s the same thing.’
‘Exactly,’ said Huang Yiyi. ‘The ciphers they used weren’t particularly difficult, but they were developed for a machine, the world’s first proper encryption machine. Earlier so-called encryption machines were basically more like calculators; fundamentally they brought nothing to the original cipher. You could say that no one up until that time had worked out a way to make an encrypting machine. Enigma was the first, and it’s a landmark in the history of cryptography. If I told you that Sivincy wrote her cipher for a commercially available rotor machine which is basically a carbon copy of Enigma, would you believe me? Of course you wouldn’t, because Enigma is so famous, and so many people have researched it; if you are a thief you don’t go and steal something in plain sight, right? But I am absolutely sure that the machine used is Enigma, and that any differences are superficial – it has wheels where the original had cogs; thirty-four matrices rather than twenty-six, with actuating motors rather than gears, but the underlying principles are fundamentally the same. If you want a comparison, it’s as if someone published a translation claiming it was an original work …’
This discovery really amazed us all. Just as Huang Yiyi said, Sivincy had pulled a very nasty trick on us, the cow. It was very difficult for us to find our footing when dealing with someone so unprincipled.
After supper we went for a walk, and Huang Yiyi and I analysed the motives behind Sivincy’s plagiarism of ULTRA. We decided that the reason Sivincy wrote her cipher for an Enigma machine, rather than anything else, was because it was part of an elaborately crafted scheme. It wasn’t because she was stupid, or because she had no choice, but because she was actually extremely crafty. Ripping off ULTRA is like stealing an advertising hoarding on a busy street, or the portrait of Chairman Mao off the wall outside Tiananmen. If you walk straight up in broad daylight and steal them, even if the police spot you they aren’t going to realize what you are up to. Sivincy was a famous mathematician; most people wouldn’t believe it possible that someone of her calibre would produce a rip-off. Just think about it – if someone you would never imagine stealing anything actually does so, how great are their chances of success? It was clever, but it was a wicked sort of cleverness. If we hadn’t seen this data that day (given that our job was to decrypt her cipher), we might well have been completely misled, digging ourselves further into a rut, not realizing that the answer to the riddle was right beside us in our textbooks.
‘She deserves all the ridicule she gets,’ Huang Yiyi said.
‘But she’s achieved her objective,’ I said. ‘A cipher is a tool, and if you can’t break it, then it has been successful. No matter how you look at it, you have no right to sneer at her.’
‘Clearly we are going to have to be just as devious as she is,’ she replied.
I asked her what kind of thing she had in mind, and she wanted me to write to Anderov and find out more about Sivincy. I knew that Anderov was very sensitive and careful, so it would not be at all easy to get anything out of him. That was why I still had not sent the letter. But in the current impasse we had no other way to learn about Sivincy, so it seemed that I would have to give this a go.
That evening, as instructed by Huang Yiyi, I wrote a letter to Anderov.
The contents of the letter seemed entirely innocuous, but I thought very carefully about my choice of words. I can’t remember exactly what I wrote, just that since coming back I had been very busy organizing Xiaoyu’s funeral, and that was why I had not had time to write to him, and that I hoped he would forgive me. I also told him that I had recently started work in a new work unit, a code school, and that now I would be teaching other people everything I had learnt from him. Apart from teaching the students encoding, I was also teaching them a bit of history, mainly the history of Russian codes. As part of that I was teaching them about some famous Soviet experts. I wrote down his name, and followed it with a list of the names of other Russians, one of whom, of course, was Sivincy. I said I didn’t have enough material for my classes, and hoped that he would do his best to send me some personal information about each of them. All this was just to hide the fact that we were trying to get at Sivincy through him.
I sent the letter, but hardly dared hope that he would actually write back.
15
Originally I had imagined that once Huang Yiyi had grasped what Sivincy was up to, plagiarizing ULTRA, she would be buoyed up by this success to carry on devoting her time and attention to RECOVERY. I was not expecting her to go back to her old ways, running crazy. One day she was in the woods feeding biscuits to the squirrels, the next she had run round to the guards’ compound to play chess – and she even found something to amuse her at the carpenters’ workshop, because she seemed to be there every five minutes. When she was in her office she kept the door shut and wouldn’t talk to anyone. She also wouldn’t read reports. She clearly didn’t care if she put everyone’s backs up. Chen complained all the time to me about her insouciance: ‘Look! Look at her! Is that acceptable?’
It really was not acceptable.
That evening I went to her house for a serious talk. The moment I got through the door I just stopped dead. Do you know what she was doing? She was telling her own fortune with a pack of cards, and as far as I could make out she wanted to know if she would be lucky in love, because she was roaring with laughter when it came out. I asked her what on earth she was doing and she asked me seriously, ‘Hey, I’ve heard that your wife is dead. Is that right?’
‘It has nothing to do with you,’ I said crossly.
‘Of course it does,’ she said confidently. ‘Can’t you see what I’m doing? I’m telling fortunes. I want to know if you and I are destined to be together.’
‘The only thing I want you to do is concentrate on the cipher!’ I shouted.
She smiled at me. ‘All love is a kind of cipher which two people have to decrypt together. I’ve already decrypted your cipher, and the answer is me.’
That evening when I got home I took the little altar that I had set up to Xiaoyu in the library, with the casket containing her ashes, an incense burner and some candles, and moved it into the living room. I wanted Xiaoyu to tell Huang Yiyi that any relationship between us was impossible. Although Xiaoyu was dead there was no room in my heart for any other woman.
It didn’t work like that, because Huang Yiyi used it as a weapon against me. One evening when she came to find me, the first thing she spotted was Xiaoyu’s altar, and after a moment’s surprise she lit an incense stick and with tears pouring down her face she started to tell her deepest feelings to Xiaoyu’s picture. She addressed Xiaoyu as if she were a member of the family, and said that she hoped that in paradise she would look with sympathy on the fact that she loved me and help her, make me accept her love.
