Mai Jia - Decoded

In actual fact, he did not know how to play elephant chess until he got sick, but by the time he left hospital he had become a very fine player. He had learned the game from one of the doctors. According to what the experts said later on, the whole problem developed as a result of the fact that the doctor taught him to play elephant chess at too early a stage in his recovery. As the expert said, when someone is starving, you can’t give them a full meal straight away. In this kind of case, when the patient begins his recovery you do not want him to concentrate his intelligence upon one object — if that happens, it may well be the case that later he finds it impossible to detach his concentration from that object. Of course, there is no reason why a surgeon should know anything about the treatment of psychological problems; what is more he was a fan of elephant chess and often played the game with his patients. One day, when he realized that the schizophrenic seemed to be able to understand the movements of the pieces on the board, he thought that this was a sign that he was beginning to recover, so he started playing the game with him too. He thought that this was consolidating the man’s recovery, but in fact it all ended in disaster; he turned a great cryptographer, who might well have made a full recovery from his breakdown, into a chessplaying lunatic.

In a nutshell, this was a failure of medical care at Unit 701, but what choice did they have? As it is, people have to muddle through life — if things go well it is because you are lucky; if things go badly who are you going to blame? You can’t blame anyone. If you want to find something to blame here, then blame the wretched man’s job; blame the fact that he knew too many secrets. It was the fact that he knew so much top-secret information that decreed that he would spend the rest of his life confined in this mountain valley, crippled in mind. People said that when he played elephant chess, you could still see how clever he must have been before he got so sick, but the rest of the time his IQ was about the same level as that of a dog. If you shouted at him he would run away; if you smiled at him he would obediently obey your commands. Because he had nothing to do, he would wander around inside Unit 701 all day every day, like a poor little lost soul.Now this lost soul had found Rong Jinzhen.

Rong Jinzhen didn’t try and make him go away, like other people did.

It was very easy to get him to leave you alone: all you had to do was shout at him sternly a couple of times. Rong Jinzhen did not do that; he didn’t avoid him, he didn’t shout at him, he didn’t even glare at him. He treated him just the same as he treated everyone else — neither warm nor cold; quite simply as if he really didn’t care. Because of this the lunatic kept on coming to find him, he wouldn’t leave him alone; he wanted him to play another game of chess.

Another game of chess!

And another game of chess!

People were not sure if Rong Jinzhen felt sorry for the lunatic and that is why they played chess together, or whether it was because he admired the other man’s skill. Which it was did not really matter — the point is that a cryptographer does not have time to play chess. The fact is that the lunatic got that way in the first place because he became too obsessed with his ciphers — they drove him mad in the same way that a balloon that you carry on pumping air into will eventually explode. When people saw Rong Jinzhen wasting time playing chess when he should have been concentrating on his cryptography, they decided that either he really didn’t want to do this kind of work, or he was another lunatic, who imagined that he would decrypt all the ciphers in the world by moving his pieces across the board.

Was it that he didn’t want to do the work, or that he couldn’t? Very soon, they would get what seemed to be cast-iron proof that Rong Jinzhen was in the former category. It came in the form of a letter from Jan Liseiwicz.

Seven years earlier, when Professor Jan Liseiwicz scooped up his family and relatives by marriage and took them to X country to live, he certainly had no idea that one day he would have to bring these bloody people back again. The fact is, he had no choice: bargaining his way out was not an option. Originally, his mother-in-law had been a very healthy woman, but thanks to her transplantation to an entirely alien country and an ever-growing homesickness, her health was quickly undermined. When she realized that she might very well be facing the prospect of dying far from home, she demanded with as much force as ever an old Chinese person did to go home to die.

Where was home?

In China!

Half the guns in X country were trained against China! As you will have gathered, it was not going to be easy to satisfy his mother-in-law’s demands. In fact, it was so difficult that Jan Liseiwicz simply refused to even consider the idea. However, his father-in-law revealed a thuggish streak in his character — belied by his family’s respectable reputation — by putting a knife against his neck and threatening to commit suicide. It was at that moment that Liseiwicz realized that he was caught in a horrible trap; he had no choice but to obey the old brute’s demands. It was also perfectly clear that the reason his father-in-law proceeded to this extreme — where he was prepared to risk his own life — was because his wife’s demands now were exactly the same as those he was planning to make one day. The knife that he put to his neck was there to tell his son-in-law that if it turned out that survival meant that he was doomed to die abroad, he would rather kill himself immediately so he could be buried with his wife back in China!

To tell the truth, Jan Liseiwicz found it very difficult to understand this old Chinese gentleman’s strange determination, but the fact that he did not understand did not matter in the least. When the knife was at the neck and a scene of carnage looked likely to unfold at any moment, what does it matter whether you understand or not? You have no choice but to do what he wants; if you don’t understand it you still have to do it; if you find it horrible you still have to do it; and what is more, you have to do it in person. Given the constant barrage of exaggerated propaganda that they were all living under, his family (including his wife) were very worried that he would not be able to come back alive. Nevertheless, that spring Jan Liseiwicz took his failing mother-in-law back to her old home town by plane, train, and finally by car.

The story goes that when his old mother-in-law was lifted into the car that had been hired to take her to her home town, she opened her eyes wide when she heard the driver speak in familiar accents, then she peacefully closed her eyes forever. What does it mean when they say that a life is hanging by a thread? That is a life hanging by a thread. The voice of the driver speaking in the dialect of her home town was like a knife. The knife descended and the thread that was her life blew away in the wind.

On his journey, Jan Liseiwicz had to travel through C City. That did not mean that he was able to visit N University. He was under strict restrictions the whole way — I do not know if these restrictions were imposed by the Chinese or by X country, but either way he was followed everywhere by two minders: one was Chinese and the other came from X country. The trio seemed to be roped together — they dragged him along between them. Where he went and how fast he got there was entirely up to them — it was as if he were a robot, or perhaps some kind of national treasure. The fact is that he was only a mathematician, or at least that is what it said in his passport. These conditions were, to hear Master Rong tell it, imposed by the historical circumstances. . [Transcript of the interview with Master Rong]