In the dark, p.26
In the Dark, page 26
‘I’ve promised Zhang Guoqing,’ she said, ‘and I’m not going to go back on my word. Besides, anyone who cares about that sort of thing wouldn’t be a good choice as a husband; we’d split up right away.’
‘Everyone cares about that sort of thing – every man, at any rate.’
‘Well in that case I am doomed to stay single.’
‘The Party is doing its best, and we need you to cooperate. Please don’t make any further representations about Zhang Guoqing.’
‘I can keep quiet for a bit, but I’m not going to let it go, OK? Stop dragging it out: I’m going to see that Zhang Guoqing’s problems get sorted out, and as for everything else we’ll just have to see how it goes. I’m not that farsighted, nor that patient; I really can’t be bothered to look eight generations into the future before I decide what to do. The only thing that matters to me right now is to help Zhang Guoqing – first, because I promised him I would, and second, because you know what he’s like, he’s completely open and honest, and if I don’t help him, who will? Being honest won’t solve his problems, will it? And if his problems aren’t solved, how can he ever be happy? That’s why I want to get involved, and if you don’t want to help, that’s fine, I’ll find someone else who will.’
Since I was now painted into a corner, I had to help out. At that point in time she was a goddess – she could summon the wind and raise the rain, she could turn base metal into gold – and what she said went. If I didn’t do this for her, someone else would. And if someone else stepped forward to help her, then I would have annoyed her, and that could bring down a lot of trouble on my own head. Whenever senior people came, did any of them not want to meet her? They all wanted to see her! She could easily take the opportunity either to complain about me or to say something nice – something as easy for her as leading a lamb, but it could change my destiny. What is meant by one word changing your life? Right then, every word she said could change your life. I certainly wasn’t stupid enough to annoy her and then let someone else take advantage of that fact. So since she was insisting on helping Zhang Guoqing, and also mentioned that she’d really like Comrade Wang’s problems sorted out as well, I had no hesitation in doing my very best for her. I had to make a special trip to headquarters, and then everything was done.
To tell you the truth, right then the Party would have taken seriously any request that she cared to make, and would have done their best to fulfil her every wish. The problems that Zhang Guoqing and Comrade Wang had were actually internal, and could be solved within the work unit, so the minute she made her request, it was fixed – it was really no trouble.
28
Unit 701 was usually sealed, and the people inside were allowed no contact with the outside world. Perhaps it was for that reason that gossip flourished so readily. Zhang Guoqing and Comrade Wang’s situation was known to everyone in the unit, and when Huang Yiyi saved them, that really was a fresh bit of news – before we knew where we were, everybody had heard about it. They called Huang Yiyi ‘Angel’ or ‘The Angel with Problems’. Thinking about it, they were perfectly correct. What kind of person could have brought them out of hell? No ordinary human being, only an angel! And if you think about it, what kind of person could have cracked RECOVERY like that? Only an angel! Calling Huang Yiyi the Angel was doubly appropriate, and so everyone started calling her that.
About the same time as people started calling her Angel, rumours about her affair with Zhang Guoqing started to spread. I was expecting that; it was nothing to be surprised about. Any gossip worth their salt could have guessed, and having guessed could investigate, could get proof, could talk. But if Zhang Guoqing’s wife came back to work at the hospital in Unit 701, given that walls have ears, sooner or later she would find out. So for ‘security reasons’ we sent her to work as a nurse in the People’s Hospital in the nearest town. Comrade Wang asked not to return to the training centre – I guess he felt he had lost too much face – he chose instead to go to one of Unit 701’s branch offices at the other end of the country. Clearly he was breaking off all contact with Huang Yiyi.
Zhang Guoqing’s wife’s situation was different; even though she worked in town, she came back every day, since her home was in Unit 701. What was she called? I’ve been trying to remember, but I can’t. It’s on the tip of my tongue, but I just can’t quite get it. I need her name because she’s a part of the rest of this story, and it’s annoying not to be able to remember. But since I can’t call it to mind, I will just have to carry on regardless. She – Zhang Guoqing’s wife – was someone I had never had anything to do with before, and I had managed to completely ignore her existence. But since Huang Yiyi was having an affair with her husband, I had to pay attention to her after she came back, because I was afraid she would find out what was going on and cause trouble. I had heard people in the hospital say she was a real shrew. There is a saying that in this world there are two sorts of people that you really need to watch out for: shrewish women and toadying men. Both are the kind that causes trouble. In this case, the problem was obvious, and I was worried that if she found out the truth and started creating scenes, Huang Yiyi’s reputation would be ruined, with concomitant damage to her work. Outsiders didn’t realize, but after cracking RECOVERY, our superiors set us a new assignment: breaking Russian military ciphers. Given that Huang Yiyi was familiar with Soviet methods, she was the first choice to take charge of this project.
It is true for everyone that if a relationship goes wrong or they have a personal problem, it affects their work. For some people it wouldn’t matter, or at least I wouldn’t worry about it, but anything affecting Huang Yiyi was serious. She was now not only the head of a division but a key figure in our cryptography programme and a model worker in Unit 701. If anything happened to her it would affect all of us, so it was our duty to protect her. Protecting her security, making sure that she was healthy and well-fed – that was easy; the problem was that we had no idea what Zhang Guoqing’s wife would do when she found out. I wanted to protect Huang Yiyi but I didn’t know how. Not only did I not know how to prevent disaster, I had no idea how I was going to minimize the damage if the worst happened. The whole thing was a real headache, but it seemed as though all I could do was wait.
Zhang Guoqing’s wife came back.
One month passed.
A second month passed.
Everything was quiet on the Zhang Guoqing’s wife front; there wasn’t any sign of trouble. The possibility I was most worried about seemed to have been averted, and the thing I most wanted to have happen did: within the space of six months Huang Yiyi cracked three mid-level Soviet military ciphers one after the other; it was wonderful news! It was an excellent omen. You see, regardless of whether you are thinking about Zhang Guoqing’s wife or about the ciphers, the first couple of months were going to be crucial. Having got safely through them, everything else seemed to be easy. The saying about how the beginning is always the most difficult really seemed to apply here!
Having got safe and sound through that first six months, I felt as though I must have a guardian angel somewhere looking out for me. Everything was going well, and I don’t need to tell you how pleased I was. The only thing that wasn’t going according to plan was the search for a husband for Huang Yiyi. The whole thing went completely wrong: the Party came up with a list of suitable men and asked her opinion, but she very tactfully said no to all of them. She had good reason to do so: everyone in the unit knew that she was having an affair with Zhang Guoqing, gossip had seen to that. The only person who didn’t know was Zhang Guoqing’s wife. In the circumstances, picking someone from within the unit really wouldn’t work – after all everyone needs a bit of self-respect. So in the end the Party moved to Plan B: finding someone from outside. It is easy to say, ‘Oh, we’ll just find someone suitable for Huang Yiyi’, but there weren’t that many men of the right age with the requisite education and self-confidence.
Why did we want someone self-confident? Well, the first couple of candidates we found seemed OK on paper but when they actually met her, and saw how pretty Huang Yiyi was, and heard about how much she had done for the country – that was it; they didn’t dare have anything to do with her. It was as if they surrendered before they could lose. Later on we found another man, a colonel from the nearby garrison. The two of them seemed to get along all right, and they met three times in the space of a month, but there wasn’t a fourth time. It was over. We asked what the problem was, and the colonel said that she was far too free and easy; having met each other just three times and really not knowing each other at all well, she was already wanting to hug and kiss him, and in broad daylight too! What did she think that looked like? Clearly he had been scared off by Huang Yiyi’s manner. There was another one who Huang Yiyi liked, a professor from the university at the provincial capital. A few years earlier he had been denounced as a Rightist and his wife had divorced him. He was about the same age as Huang Yiyi and had studied abroad. They enjoyed each other’s company a lot, to the point where you could almost say that they fell in love at first sight. The professor also had plenty of gall: the second time they met they spent the night together. They carried on like that for a couple of weeks and then Huang Yiyi came running to see me and said, ‘He’s the one.’ She told us to get on with the security check.
The security check wrecked any chance they might have had of getting married.
Why? Well, the professor’s father had been a high-ranking official in the KMT, and he had maybe seven or eight siblings, some of whom had gone to Taiwan, some were in Hong Kong, and some were in the US. Given the security considerations of Unit 701, it was strictly forbidden to marry anyone with family connections overseas. Those were the rules, and no one dared to break them. They applied to our superiors and they applied to us. So yet again Huang Yiyi’s marriage plans didn’t work out.
According to my information, in the six months after Zhang Guoqing’s wife came back, Huang Yiyi had no contact at all with him. Later on though – I don’t know why, perhaps it was to do with the fact that she couldn’t find a husband – the two of them got back together. One time I saw with my own eyes Zhang Guoqing leaving Huang Yiyi’s house early in the morning, and that really did give me a turn. Given that we all lived in the same compound, sooner or later the woman was bound to find out. So I went in person to see the mayor and asked him to get the hospital to give Zhang Guoqing’s wife accommodation in town. If they were all living in town, Zhang Guoqing’s wife would have no reason to come up the mountain, and if they went their separate ways the chances of anyone letting the cat out of the bag were much reduced. Most of the time after work Zhang Guoqing would go down to town to join his family, but every so often he would stay overnight with Huang Yiyi on the mountain. I made time to call several times on Zhang Guoqing’s family, to tell his wife that he was so busy at work that he would not always be able to get home, saying something about how I hoped she would support him … I went to a lot of trouble to protect them – I used my power, I told a lot of lies; to use Huang Yiyi’s own words, I pandered to them. Quite honestly, the whole of Unit 701 pandered to them. Even the dogs living on that mountain knew they were having an affair. Everyone was very careful, and they all played their part in making sure that Zhang Guoqing’s wife never found out, no matter what.
Of course I knew perfectly well that this wasn’t a long-term solution and that we would have to find Mr Right so that Huang Yiyi could get married and have a proper home. So on the one hand we were trying to keep a lid on things, while on the other we were searching high and low for someone suitable for Huang Yiyi. That was hard, but we had to carry on looking. This wasn’t Huang Yiyi’s problem any more, it was Unit 701’s problem; a government problem. Maybe you don’t believe it, but it’s true.
One afternoon the following spring, Huang Yiyi suddenly burst into my office. The second she got through the door she said, ‘I want to marry Zhang Guoqing!’
I was surprised and didn’t know what to say, so it was only after a long pause that I replied, and with a stupid question at that.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘I mean what I say. I want to marry Zhang Guoqing.’
‘Is this some kind of joke?’
‘No.’
‘What on earth is going on? Why have you all of a sudden decided you want to marry him?’
‘I can’t stand seeing him go back to his wife every day.’
‘Is that the problem? I will tell Zhang Guoqing not to go home so often. You don’t have to marry him.’
‘No. I want to get married.’ She said it very calmly, very firmly, and had clearly thought it through beforehand.
I was cross with her. ‘If you wanted to marry him all along, why did we go to all the trouble of bringing his family back –’
She cut me short. ‘That was then and this is now. I want to marry him, so you tell him to get a divorce.’
She then walked out and didn’t stop, no matter how much I yelled at her.
After she left, I just sat behind my desk in a daze. The whole thing seemed more than a little peculiar: if she wanted to get married to him, why had she come to tell me before even mentioning it to him? She seemed to be carrying on as if getting married was a task that I’d set her. And another thing, she had never wanted to marry him before, so what could have put that idea into her head all of a sudden? It was a bad idea from start to finish, and we had all been put to an awful lot of trouble for nothing! Oh well, come what may I had to sort it out for her. Even though it wasn’t really my job, when you get right down to it, it was work. I knew what she was like: if things didn’t go to her liking she could do absolutely anything, including going on hunger strike, or taking to her bed for three days, until I was completely desperate. Well, she was the Angel and I was just an ordinary mortal, so what could I do? I had to do what she wanted. So I went to find Zhang Guoqing and explained the situation, and finally I asked his opinion.
His answer was very straightforward: he would listen to the Party.
The Party wanted him to get divorced.
So he got a divorce.
In fact, even if he had not wanted to follow the Party’s wishes, he would still have had to divorce his wife, because there was no room for manoeuvre there. This decision came from the Angel. The amazing fact that the Angel was cracking one cipher after the other told us one thing: the more angelic she was, the more we had to dance to her tune; but as long as we did so all would be well.
A divorce here, a wedding there: they were in such a hurry there was no time for discussion – they didn’t even really think about the rules, just like a pair of ignorant teenagers. The wedding was very simple, just the people from their divisions, me and a few of our superiors. All in all there were enough guests for two tables at the unit’s dining hall. After the meal we went round to the newly married couple’s home to eat wedding-sweets. We wished them well and cracked a few jokes, as seemed appropriate to the situation. We got to see her retching again and again, and then we understood everything: she was pregnant!
Now we all knew why Huang Yiyi had been in such a hurry to get married: it couldn’t be more clear. What nobody knew was that in addition to the obvious reason, there was another that was much more important and much more mysterious. Huang Yiyi had been married twice already, and had had innumerable boyfriends. But in spite of all those men, and over such a long period of time, she had never once been pregnant. This was the first time! Even Huang Yiyi was amazed that after so many men Zhang Guoqing was the first for her, and even with him nothing had happened to begin with – they had to go through a certain period of getting familiar with each other and waiting. It was as if there was a lock on her womb, which Zhang Guoqing had only gradually worked out how to open.
Having found Mr Right, and now also being pregnant, I should have been happy for her. But every time I thought about her having to stop work, even if only temporarily, I was really unhappy. This simply wasn’t the right moment for Huang Yiyi to have a baby. Everything has its time and place, and if the same thing happens in two completely different times and places, the result is totally different. But how could I tell her that? This was so important to her, besides which she was already well into her thirties – so how could I ask her to put it off? There it was: the national interest on one side and her happiness on the other, neither of which could be ignored, and I was caught in the middle. What to do for the best? I was deeply worried.
In the end I came down in favour of the national interest and made a suggestion to Huang Yiyi that really wasn’t within the scope of my duties.
I was anticipating that she would refuse, but I was not expecting what actually happened next. One day Zhang Guoqing came to ask me for permission to take a car out, because Huang Yiyi was feeling ill and wanted to go to hospital. The hospital was next to the training centre, a good few kilometres from the housing complex. In the past, when she was having the affair with Comrade Wang, she had regularly walked there and back, but this time she clearly wasn’t feeling at all well and needed the car.
The car brought Huang Yiyi back from the hospital less than two hours later. She came straight to my office, and stood in front of me. Then she said something very peculiar: ‘Happy now?’
When she got to the hospital they told her that she had a cold, and although they could easily have given her medication for it, the doctor refused on the grounds that it would be bad for the baby. Huang Yiyi counted up on her fingers; during the course of her pregnancy she had in fact taken this medication on at least a couple of occasions. The doctor found a box and took out the instructions leaflet with the words ‘contraindicated for pregnant women’, and gave it to her to read, combined with a verbal explanation that made her skin crawl. It was too late for regrets now though.
