Decoded (30 page)

The farmer said: ‘Just now a donkey bucked and with one of its feet kicked out two of my front teeth.’

Paul said: ‘Then you ought to be laughing, why is it that you cry?’

The farmer said: ‘I cry because I am in pain and feel deeply hurt, tell me, why should I laugh?’

Paul said: ‘The Lord has said, for a young man to have lost his teeth and have had his forehead split is a good omen, it means that happiness will soon be upon you.’

The farmer said: ‘Then please entreat the Lord to give me a son.’

In that year, the farmer indeed had a son.*

Now your forehead has also been cracked open, will happiness soon be upon you as well?

Something will indeed happen, only it is difficult for you to tell if it will be good or ill. That’s because you don’t know what is good for you.

* Remember, Weinacht and Liseiwicz were one and the same. At this time, however, Rong Jinzhen did not know this.

07

I have seen all that is under heaven and it is all hollow, empty, all clutching at the wind. That which is crooked cannot be straightened, that which lacks cannot ever be sufficient. My heart tells me that I have obtained a formidable intelligence, surpassing all of those from my time before in Jerusalem, and my heart has experienced and possesses more knowledge and understands more of things. I have also been engrossed in open enquiries and secret searches into wisdom, egotism and ignorance, but I know that this is still only clutching at the wind. With much knowledge comes much worry and frustration; increasing knowledge only increases grief.†

08

He is very rich, ever richer.

He is destitute, ever more destitute.

He is he.

He is also he.

09

The doctor said a good stomach is smooth on the outside and rough on the inside: if you turned it inside out, with the rough

* This is a Bible story. The Apostle Paul was on the road to Jerusalem to preach. One day he met a farmer down on his knees wailing profusely. They had the above conversation.
† This passage is derived from Ecclesiastes 5.

side outermost, then a good stomach would look very much like a newly hatched chick, covered from top to bottom with shaggy hair. The hair would be evenly distributed. But my stomach is the reverse: it looks like someone suffering from favus of the scalp, oozing with blood and pus. The doctor also said most people assume that stomach disease is caused by the consumption of unhealthy foods, but actually, the main reason for a stomach ailment is obsessive worrying. It is not brought about by injurious drink and food, but by utopian longings and flights of fancy.

When have I consumed injurious drink and food?

My stomach seems like a foreign substance in my body, an enemy (a spy); it has never smiled at me.

10

You should loathe your stomach.

But you cannot.

The imprint of Daddy rests upon it.

It was that old man who had forged your stomach: it has a harmful disposition, extremely fragile, like a pear blossom. Does your stomach know how many pear blossoms it has consumed?

When your stomach hurts, you think of pear blossoms, you think of that old man.

Daddy, you’re not dead, not only do you live in my heart, you also live on in my stomach.

11

You always exert great energy to walk forward; you don’t like to look behind. Because you don’t like to look behind, you make demands on yourself to exert even more energy to walk forward.

12

All that is under heaven has all been planned by God.

If you were allowed to make your own plans, you might make of yourself a hermit who has fled this world, or perhaps a prisoner. The best would be an innocent prisoner, or a prisoner who cannot be saved; in any case a man free of guilt.

At present, God’s plan conforms to your wishes.

13

A shadow has caught hold of you.

Because you stopped.

14

Yet another shadow has caught hold of you!

15

Klaus Johannes said sleeping is most exhausting because you have to dream.

I say not working is most exhausting because your mind is empty. It is very much like dreaming; the past can take advantage of your weakness and burst in.

Work is the means by which the past can be forgotten, and even the reason for it can be cast off.

16

Like a bird leaving its nest. Like running away . . .

17

‘You ungrateful bastard, where are you running to?’

‘I’m to your west . . . in the valley a kilometre away.’

‘Why haven’t you returned to see us?’

‘I can’t . . . ’

‘Only a criminal cannot return home!’

‘I am almost a criminal . . . ’

He is his own criminal!

18

You gave him too much! With too much he simply won’t dare to recollect, thinking makes him uncomfortable, he feels remorseful, humbled, he would think that all he has was obtained by luck and that would be depressing, as though his pitiful lot in life had been achieved by preying on your benevolence.

The ancients said, no more no less, no contentment no suffering. God said, all under heaven is unsatisfactory . . .

19

Some people who are loved become blessed; others become cursed. Because of such a blessing, he wanted to return.

Because of being cursed, he wanted to leave.

He did not leave because he discovered this, it was because he hda left that he learnt of it.

20

An ignorant person has no fear.

Fear is like a cord wound around him, pulling him back; it seemed to be hung round him telling people he was unsuitable to be confided in.

21

Mummy, how are you?

Mother, mother, my dear mother!

22

Before drifting off to sleep last night you purposely encouraged yourself to dream. But no trace remains of what you dreamt. You most likely dreamt about work because that was your objective, you wanted to free yourself of ‘the worry about not working’.

23

Pointing his index finger at me, Klaus Johannes told me that in this profession he is the greatest, I’m next after him.* But he also criticised me, saying I had committed two fatal errors: first, I had become part of the system; second, I had gone about deciphering these mid to low-level ciphers that other people could easily crack – the second mistake derived from the first.† The outcome of these two errors, Johannes told me, pushed me farther and farther away from him; it did not bring me closer. I said that now our adversary was no longer using any new high-level cipher, if I didn’t do this work then what would I do? Klaus Johannes said he had recently completed writing a book, a work that represented the apex of high-level cryptography. Since comprehending the highest or the lowest level of secrets was difficult, then whoever deciphered his book, whoever understood its contents, within thirty years that person could easily decipher all of the most sophisticated ciphers in the world. He suggested that I try to decipher his book and at the same time stuck his thumb up to me saying that if I should crack it, then his thumb would represent me.

* Karl Johannes, of German origin, was a famous cryptographer during the Second World War. He died in 1948.
† This much was certain, since after becoming section chief he participated in the deciphering of every cipher that they encountered.

Contrary to what one might expect, this was actually good news. But where is this book?

In my dream.

No, it was in the dream within my dream, in the mind of my imaginary Klaus Johannes.

24

If this world truly had such a book, it could only have come from the hand of Klaus Johannes.
No one else!

In all honesty, his mind was just like this book.

25

During his lifetime, Klaus Johannes did write one book; it was called
The Writing of the Gods
.* Someone once said that they saw it in a bookshop. But this is highly unlikely since I had have already mobilized all the forces at my disposal to search for the book and yet we have not found it.
There is nothing in this world that my people can’t locate, unless there was nothing there to begin with.

26

You are a rat.

You are waiting inside a barn.

But you cannot eat the millet.

Each grain of millet has been daubed with a protective coating to prevent your teeth from gnawing into it.

– That is cryptography.

*
The Writing of the Gods
: Chunghwa Book Company, 1945; the translation was given the title
The Riddle
. Clearly Rong Jinzhen was angry that the secret services had searched for this book but could not find it.

Ciphers on the one hand make the intelligence that you need disappear from under your eyes – you reach out and yet you cannot touch it. On the other hand they blind your eyes, so that you can see nothing.

28

When Douglas MacArthur stood on the Korean peninsula, he raised his hand into the sky and caught a handful, then he gestured to his cryptographers and said: this is the intelligence that I wanted, I want to know everything, things that are all around me, things that I cannot see because I am blind. It is up to you to restore my vision.

Several years later, in his reminiscences he wrote: ‘My cryptographers never once let me open my eyes, not even once. I was very lucky to come back alive.’

29

Might as well repeat MacArthur’s action and extend a hand to grasp at the sky. But your purpose is not to grasp the air, but to catch a bird. There is always a bird in the sky, but the likelihood of you grabbing hold of it with your bare hands is terribly remote. This remoteness is not the same as saying it’s impossible, since some people can indeed miraculously grab hold of a bird in the sky.

– That is decryption.

However, the majority of people will only grab hold of a few bird feathers, even if they work on it their whole lives.

30

What kind of person can truly grab hold of a bird?

Perhaps John Nash could.*

But Liseiwicz can’t, although his genius is not necessarily inferior to that of John Nash.

* John Nash, the American mathematician, played a key role in the development of game theory, for which he was one of the recipients of the 1994 Nobel Prize for Economics. His accomplishments in the field of pure mathematics were equally astounding: he was one of the founders of modern partial differential mathematics. Unfortunately, at the age of just thirty-four, he developed severe paranoid schizophrenia. This brought his remarkable genius to a premature conclusion.

Although Nash would be able to catch a bird in flight, in my mind’s eye I couldn’t be sure of when he might do so. However, as long as Liseiwicz paid close attention to Nash’s line of sight, to the precise moment at which he began to move his hand; if he paid attention to his attitude, his nimbleness, his accuracy, his power to leap, etc.; if he were to raise his head again to scan the skies for the number of birds in it, the speed at which they were flying, their path, special characteristics and changes in their motion, etc.; then perhaps he could judge when Nash would reach out to clasp a bird in his hands.

Possessing the same level of ability, Liseiwicz’s genius was more rigorous, cautious, and more beautiful, like that of an angel, like a god. Nash’s genius, however, was something unfamiliar, an unfamiliarity that made it seem freakish and uncivilized, as though he was possessed by an evil spirit. Ciphers are the work of the devil; they stand as testament to the craftiness and evilness of people, to our treacherous nature, our sinister intent, our devilish aptitude, there are no steps to be added, thus Nash, a man indistinguishable from the devil, was able to draw ever so close to them.

32

Sleep and death have the same given name, but not the same surname. Sleep prepares one for death; dreams are a kind of hell. People say that your spirit passes through your carcass to become small, your mind passes through your corpse to become tiny, this is the fundamental characteristic of demons and hobgoblins.

People also say that since you have had dealings with the dream world since you were a child, you’ve been polluted by the wickedness and evil encountered there; that is why you are able to catch hold of a bird in mid-flight.

33

All the secrets of this world are held in dreams.

34

You only need to prove yourself.

When you do so, your opponent will assist you.

When you cannot, your opponent will prove himself. You long for some other person of talent to step forth and permit you to keep your mouth shut. But to make this happen, you need to continue to speak.*

36

They’ve changed my personal security guard yet again; the reason for this one’s dismissal was her failure to come and collect my notebook. She’s not the first to be dismissed and she won’t be the last.

37

My new personal security guard will most definitely be a woman . . . †

Who is she?

* I can speculate that since English is used here, this is some quotation or other, but I cannot find the source.
† During the mid 1970s, marriage for members of Unit 701 had to follow strict regulations. For instance, female comrades were prohibited from having romantic relationships with people outside the unit. If a man wished to begin a relationship with someone from the outside (although equality between the sexes was officially promoted, in reality men were privileged over women), they needed to report this to the relevant authorities. Once the report was made, the organization would dispatch agents to investigate the woman’s background. If consent was given, the relationship was allowed to proceed to the next level. Later, if this person did not wish to do a particular thing, or if there was some ‘problem’ that was difficult to resolve, then they could request that the Party step in and resolve it for them. The issue of Rong Jinzhen’s marriage had created quite a thorny problem for the authorities to deal with because he was getting older and older and yet had done nothing about getting married. He was not taking any initiative nor was he asking the authorities for help. Once he passed thirty years of age, the Party took it upon themselves to secretly and shrewdly arrange a marriage for him. First they selected an appropriate person and then arranged for that person to serve as Rong Jinzhen’s personal security guard. Not only would this woman have to have the complete trust of the Party, she also had to be determined to be by his side and hope to marry him. If she could not do that, she would have to leave in order to provide someone else with the opportunity – perhaps the next person would have better luck. It was due to this intricate plan that Rong Jinzhen’s personal security guard continued to change over and over again: the current guard was already his fourth.