Mai Jia - Decoded

One afternoon I heard that Rong Jinzhen would be coming back. Upon learning this, I set off to see him, but I was a bit too early, he had not yet arrived home and so I waited in the courtyard in front of his apartment. Shortly afterwards, I saw a jeep slide into the courtyard and come to a stop. Two people leapt out, an administrator from our division by the name of Huang, and Rong Jinzhen’s wife, Di Li. I went over to greet them. They looked me over, taking note of my slovenly appearance, and then turned back towards the jeep to assist Rong Jinzhen in getting out. It seemed as though he was unwilling to leave the car, as if he were something fragile, something easily broken; he could not just get out of the jeep, he had to alight carefully and slowly, ever so cautiously.

After a moment, he finally managed to get out of the vehicle. But the man I saw was not Rong Jinzhen — he bore no resemblance to the man I knew. This man was hunched over, his whole body trembling; his head seemed as though it had only been recently attached to his body — it was awkwardly placed, and seemed to be teetering off balance. His eyes were wide open, globular, filled with some unknown terror, and yet there was no glimmer of light in them; his mouth hung open like some gaping rift or breach, as though it couldn’t be closed, and from time to time a line of drool slipped out. .

Could this be Rong Jinzhen?

My heart felt as though something were squeezing it, pressing down upon it; my mind became confused, disordered. It seemed as though his notebook had drawn the strength from me, had made me afraid; and now seeing Rong Jinzhen, this shell of a man, it was the same. I stood there dumbfounded, not daring to greet him, as if this Rong Jinzhen had somehow scalded me, burnt my flesh. As his wife half-carried him away, Rong Jinzhen, like some terrible thought, disappeared from in front of me. But there was no way the memory of what I had seen would ever leave me.

Once I returned to my office, I tumbled upon the sofa; my feet were heavy and devoid of energy, my mind was blank. I felt nothing, I was a corpse propped up on a couch. It goes without saying that the shock I had received was too much; in no way less than the shock I received upon reading the notebook. Slowly, gradually, my spirits began to return, but the image of Rong Jinzhen when he alighted from the jeep still danced before my eyes. It was like a rare and horrible idea rudely and unreasonably playing about in my head: I couldn’t expel it, I couldn’t express it — I couldn’t fail but to acknowledge it. This was how I became hemmed in by the image of a deranged Rong Jinzhen. The image tortured me and the more I thought about it, the more I felt pity for him — how wretched he had become, how utterly terrifying. I asked myself: who had brought him to this pass? Who had destroyed him? Then I thought about what had happened, thought about the calamity, about the person responsible for it, the mastermind –

That bloody thief!

In all honesty, no one could have guessed that this would happen, that such a talented individual, such a formidable and frightening man (the image that came to me from reading his notebook), such an elevated and profound man, humanity’s crème de la crème, a hero in the field of cryptography, could ultimately be brought so low by a common street thief; could be so utterly destroyed by a mere petty criminal. I couldn’t help but feel shocked and horrified by the absurdity of it all.

All emotions possess the ability to surprise, causing you to reflect upon things. Sometimes this reflection takes place in one’s unconscious and so it is quite possible that it will have no effect; you might not even be immediately aware of it. In life, we often suddenly and unexpectedly come to think of things, have ideas take shape in our minds; and we are left to marvel at them, wondering whether or not they were given to us by some divine providence. But in truth, these thoughts are already within us, they are simply buried deeply in our unconscious minds; they have only now come to the fore, like a fish that out of the blue breaches the surface of the water.

However, at that time I was completely aware of what I was thinking: the images of that wretched little thief and the amazing Rong Jinzhen — the difference between them enormous — changed the direction of my thoughts, providing me with a clear direction to follow. Without a doubt, putting these two images together and abstracting them according to their vigour or mass, what you are left with is the gap between good and evil, heaviness and weightlessness, importance and insignificance. I thought of Rong Jinzhen, this man who had not been brought down by either a high-level cipher or a clever cryptographer, but had now been felled by the inadvertent actions of a lowly thief. He had withstood all the long days of torment and pain in trying to decipher PURPLE and BLACK, but when brought face to face with the actions of an insignificant crook, he barely lasted a couple of days before collapsing.

How was it that he was felled by the first blow?

Could it be that this thief had some unknown power, some unknown strength?

Of course not.

Was it because Rong Jinzhen was weak, frail?

Exactly!

It was all because that little criminal ran off with something Rong Jinzhen considered to be sacred as well as secret: the notebook! This thing was of the greatest importance to him and yet so insubstantial: like a person’s heart that can’t survive any blows — even the slightest knock can bring about death.

Now I’m sure you understand this. In normal situations, your most precious and sacred belonging, the thing you value most, ought to be kept in the safest, most secure place possible. In the case of Rong Jinzhen’s notebook, it should have been placed in the safe-deposit box; putting it in his leather attaché case was a mistake, a moment of negligence. But looking at it the other way round, if you think the thief was an actual enemy agent, a member of X country’s secret service whose mission it was to steal Rong Jinzhen’s notebook, then as a secret agent, it would be most unlikely that he would imagine that Rong Jinzhen could place that oh-so-important notebook, containing information requiring the utmost protection and vigilance, inside a completely unsecured leather briefcase. Consequently, his primary objective would not have been the attaché case; it could only have been the safe-deposit box. In essence then, if we were still to consider that the thief was some agent or other tasked with stealing the notebook, then having it placed in Rong Jinzhen’s leather briefcase was an ingenious means of avoiding calamity.

Later on I hypothesized again that if Rong Jinzhen’s action — placing the notebook in the leather attaché case — wasn’t unintentional, but rather deliberate, and he had become entangled in an actual special operation, then he was not simply the victim of a thief. Think about it for a moment. The cunning in his placing the notebook in his briefcase couldn’t be more sublime: the aim must have been to lure the special operative into a most sophisticated trap, right? This train of thought brought me back to BLACK. I thought, what if the creator of BLACK had taken the most vital means to decipher it — the key — and instead of hiding it out of the way, burying it deep within the cipher itself, had left it out in the open; had deliberately not put it in a safe-deposit box, but rather a leather attaché case. In that case Rong Jinzhen, this man who had searched so strenuously and persistently for the key to BLACK, was like the secret agent looking for the notebook in the wrong place.

As this thought flashed through my mind, I couldn’t help but become excited.

To tell you the truth, in terms of logic, my idea was completely absurd; but its absurdity latched on precisely to the two strange phenomena I mentioned earlier. Of these two, the former seemed to suggest that BLACK was extremely abstruse — this would be the reason why Rong Jinzhen had been unable to take the last step to decipher it; the latter seemed to suggest that BLACK was extremely simple — this would explain why over the course of three years no errors in the cipher had been discerned. You see? Only the most uncomplicated of things can exercise the right of unconstrained movement; only they can seek and obtain beauty.