It could perhaps be said that deep down Rong Jinzhen despised this symposium and everyone who attended it. Later, however, he felt that feeling this way was uncalled for; and what’s more, it was useless. BLACK, he had come to realize, was a cancer eating at his body. For years he had tried to get at it, and still he was no closer to it. Death now shadowed him, sinisterly threatening him. Those who had attempted to help were neither geniuses nor sages, only gossipers. To think that they could find a cure for this cancer, that they could be the Saviour, was completely absurd, a dream, complete nonsense.[Transcript of the interview with Director Zheng]
A lonely and exhausted man, Rong Jinzhen would spend his days absorbed in thought, or perhaps we should say fantasy. Every night he would purposefully dream. As I understand things, he encouraged himself to dream every night for the following reasons: first, he had previously grasped that a certain lucidness came with his dreams (some said that it was whilst dreaming that he found the means to decipher PURPLE). Secondly, he began to suspect that the creator of BLACK was a monster gifted with a form of intelligence completely alien to humankind, and since he himself was human, the only way to get close to it would be in his dreams.
When he first came upon this idea it boosted his morale; it was as if he had found a way out. I heard that he was now instructing himself to dream every night. Dreaming had become one of his responsibilities. His deliberate excessiveness, however, only resulted in bringing him to the verge of mental collapse. One look at him and you could see that all manner of dreams were coming upon him thick and fast, never-ending. The dreams were disorderly, without coherent thought; the only thing they accomplished was to disrupt his normal sleep. In order to restore some normality to his nights, he had no choice but to dismantle the dream patterns he had become entangled in. He took to reading novels and going for walks before heading to bed. The former helped put him at ease, especially considering the stresses of the day. The latter would tire him out. The results were positive. To use his words: reading and walking before bed were his two sleeping pills.
Still, Rong Jinzhen dreamed a great deal. He had taken everything from this world and experienced it in his dreams. In a sense, he had two worlds of existence: one real, the other a dream. People say that everything on land is also in the sea, but not everything in the sea is on land. Rong Jinzhen’s situation paralleled this: the things he had in his dreams did not necessarily exist in the real world, but everything from the real world was most certainly to be found in his dreams. I guess you could say that for Rong Jinzhen everything possessed a duality: on the one hand was reality — the realness of things, the living world; on the other, the dream, virtuality, chaos. As the idiom ‘baseless gossip’ suggests, we only accept the real world as evidence. But for Rong Jinzhen, there was always a duality: the real and the dream, and only he knew of the latter. It goes without saying that his dream world was more absurd, more incoherent than reality. .[To be continued]
Now, a more tranquil Rong Jinzhen realized that to hope for someone else to offer advice on how to decipher BLACK, to hope that someone else could put him on the correct path — that was just nonsense from his dreams, an absurdity within an absurdity. To console himself he reiterated, ‘Don’t count on anyone but yourself, don’t hope for someone else to help; they cannot tell you the right path, it’s not possible, not possible. . ’ He repeated this to himself, believing perhaps that such a mantra might make him forget the disappointment of the conference.
As it turned out, reciting this mantra did in fact make him feel better; it was not entirely without benefit. Rong Jinzhen was able to find some reassurances in it; four in fact:
1. Attendance at the conference allowed him to see that the Head of the Intelligence Services was immensely concerned about the progress made towards deciphering BLACK and the future thereafter. This made Rong Jinzhen feel somewhat stressed, but it also encouraged him, urging him on in his attempt to decrypt the cipher.
2. Attendance at the conference also allowed him to witness how nearly everyone in his profession fawned over him, either in speech or by deed (say for instance by shaking his hand overly affectionately, or by bowing at the waist instead of just a nod, or by politely smiling at everything he said, and so on). Rong Jinzhen had discovered that in their secretive world, he was a celebrity, loved by all. Before he had had some awareness of this but had never really been sure. Now that he knew, he couldn’t help but be a little cheered by it.
3. At the first drinks reception of the conference, the elderly statesman had made an impromptu promise to provide Rong Jinzhen with an incredibly sophisticated calculator, capable of over 40,000 calculations. Such a gift would be tantamount to providing Jinzhen with an internationally top-ranked assistant!
4. Before leaving, he had bought from the Yesterday Bookstore two books he had long desired, one being The Riddle (a translation of The Writing of the Gods by the famous cryptanalyst Klaus Johannes).
In sum, then, what makes a trip worthwhile?
For Rong Jinzhen, it was getting these particular items. With these in hand, Rong could happily head back to Unit 701. The train ride home would be free of incident, and free too of men hiding in shadows. Vasili would have no difficulty in booking a soft sleeper car for the journey. Once on board, Rong Jinzhen felt at ease, in total contrast to the journey six days before.
He really was quite happy to be departing the capital. Another reason for this happiness was that the night before leaving, the city had received its first winter snowfall, almost as though it had been arranged as a special send-off for this man from the south. The snow had fallen intensely, blanketing the ground, brightening the darkness. In this wintry setting, Rong Jinzhen waited for the train to depart. The silence of the falling snow and the scent of moisture it carried in the air filled his heart with peace; it was a splendid daydream.
Such a start would have satisfied even the fussiest of people, making Rong Jinzhen feel quite confident that this would be a relaxing journey home.
But what happened was anything but.
3
The trip home was completely different. For one thing, it was two days and three nights, whereas the train to Beijing took three days and two nights. Two of the nights had already passed, and the second day was in the midst of dying away. Except for sleeping, Rong Jinzhen spent his time reading his newly purchased books. It was quite obvious that he felt nothing of the anxiety or fear that had marred his previous train ride. The fact that he could sleep well and enjoy reading was proof enough. A journey home has certain advantages. For their party this was especially so since they had been able to get a sleeper car that had its own independent heating unit, which somewhat separated their berth from the rest, making it a more secure location. Rong Jinzhen couldn’t help but feel rather pleased and happy about their good fortune in getting such a car.