Decoded (3 page)

I have only one regret and that is Duckling. I have been his guardian for many years,
faute de mieux
, but now I can hear the bell tolling for me and it is clear that I have only a few days left. It is time for someone else to take care of him. I beg you to take over as his guardian. There are three reasons that you would be the perfect choice.

1. It is thanks to your bravery and generosity – you and your father (Old Lillie) – that he was ever born at all.

2. Whether you admit it or not, he is a member of the Rong family and his grandmother was the person that your father loved and admired more than anyone else in the world.

3. This child is very clever. These last few years, he has been my new-found-land. At every step, I have found myself amazed and impressed by his truly remarkable intelligence. Do not be misled by his somewhat misanthropic and cold personality; I believe that he is just as clever as his grandmother was, not to mention the fact that the two of them are as alike in appearance as two peas in a pod. She was exceptionally clever, extremely creative; an amazingly forceful personality. Archimedes said, ‘Give me a place to stand and I will move the earth.’ I believe that he is that kind of person. However, right now he needs you, because he isn’t quite twelve years old.

Believe what I tell you and take the child away from here. Bring him up in your home because he needs you, needs your love, and needs an education. Perhaps more than anything else, he needs you to give him a name. I beg you!

I beg you!

This is the first and last time I have ever begged anyone for anything.

The dying R. J.

Tongzhen, 8 June 1944

1944 was the worst year that the people of the provincial capital, C City – and N University at its heart – had ever experienced. First they suffered in the front line of battle; then they were ground under the heel of the Nanjing puppet government. This brought about an enormous change not only to the appearance of the city, but also to the hearts of its people. When Young Lillie received Mr Auslander’s letter, the worst of the fighting was already over, but the chaos unleashed by the bad faith of the temporary government had reached the point of no return. By this time Old Lillie had been dead for many years and Young Lillie’s position at N University had been adversely affected by the collapse in his father’s fortunes, not to mention the intransigent attitude of the puppet government. Nevertheless, the puppet government thought very highly of Young Lillie. First of all he was famous, which meant that he was useful to them in a way that an ordinary man wouldn’t have been; secondly the Rong family had suffered a great deal at the hands of the KMT government, so they were hoping that he would prove amenable. So when the puppet government was first established, they generously offered Young Lillie (at that time just acting vice-chancellor of the university) the job of chancellor, imagining that this would be all that it took to buy him. They were not expecting that he would tear up the brevet in front of everyone and proclaim in a stentorian voice: ‘We Rongs would rather die than betray our country!’

As you might imagine, Young Lillie’s answer was very popular, but it guaranteed that he was not going to find himself with an official position. He had already been thinking for some time of avoiding the repulsive overtures of the puppet government (and the associated ferocious infighting in the university) by going into hiding in Tongzhen, but Mr Auslander’s letter unquestionably speeded his departure. Still mulling over the letter, he stepped off the paddle-steamer. At a glance he picked out the steward of the Rong mansion from the crowd huddled together against the rain and wind. The steward asked him politely if he had had a good journey. Instead of responding, he asked abruptly, ‘How is Mr Auslander?’

‘Mr Auslander is dead,’ the steward said. ‘He passed away some weeks ago.’

Young Lillie felt his heart thump in his chest. Then he asked: ‘Where is the child?’

‘Who do you mean?’

‘Duckling.’

‘He is still at the Pear Garden.’

He was living in the Pear Garden, that was right enough, but no one seemed to know what he was doing in there, since he hardly ever came out and very few people bothered to go in. Everyone knew that he was living in the mansion, but he seemed to move from place to place like a lost soul, with hardly anyone even catching a glimpse of him. According to the steward, Duckling was the next best thing to a mute.

‘I don’t understand a thing that he says to me,’ the steward said. ‘He doesn’t often speak, and when he does, he might as well not bother, because no one can understand it.’

The steward also said that according to the servants in the main mansion, it was only because the old foreign gentleman got down on his hands and knees and kowtowed three times to the Third Master that he agreed to allow Duckling to carry on living at the Pear Garden after his death. Otherwise they would have thrown him out onto the street. He went on to say that Mr Auslander had left his savings of many decades to Duckling and that was what he was living on, since the Rong family couldn’t possibly afford to pay for his food.

It was lunchtime the next day when Young Lillie walked into the Pear Garden. The rain had stopped by then, but having fallen continuously for several days, it had washed the buildings clean while creating a thick squelchy layer of mud underfoot. His footsteps left deep prints in the mud and in some places it was deep enough to cover his galoshes. As far as Young Lillie could see, there were no other footprints to be seen – the spider’s webs in the trees were empty, the spiders having retreated under the eaves to get out of the rain. Some of them were now busily occupied spinning a new web in front of the door. If it were not for the smoke rising from the chimney and the sound of something being chopped on a block, he would have believed the place to be deserted.

Duckling was chopping up a sweet potato. There was boiling water in the pot on the stove, in which a few grains of rice were bobbing about. He did not seem alarmed at Young Lillie’s intrusion, nor was he angry. He just looked at him for a moment and then went back to his work, as if it was his grandfather who came in after a short absence – his grandfather or perhaps a dog? He was smaller than Young Lillie had been expecting, and his head was not as large as people said. His skull was dolichocephalic and oddly pointed on top; almost as if he were wearing a homburg hat – perhaps it was because of this that his head did not appear abnormally huge. Young Lillie did not find anything at all remarkable in his appearance; however, his cold, calm manner made a very deep impression; he was like a little old man. The only nice pieces of furniture in the room were the medicine chest (left over from the original use of the building), a table and a director’s chair. There was a large volume lying open on the table, a musty smell emanating from its leaves. Young Lillie closed the book so that he could read the title on the spine: it was an English book – one volume of the
Encyclopedia Britannica
. Young Lillie put the book down and looked questioningly at the child. Then he asked, ‘Are you reading this?’

Duckling nodded.

‘Can you understand it?’

Duckling nodded again.

‘Did Mr Auslander teach you?’

He nodded again.

‘You don’t say anything: is this because you are mute?’ As Young Lillie spoke, he realized that his tone of voice was more aggressive than he had intended, as if he were blaming the child. ‘If you are then nod your head twice. If you are not, then say so.’ Because he was afraid that the child might not understand Chinese, Young Lillie repeated what he had said in English.

Duckling walked over to the stove, put the sweet potato that he had just finished chopping into the water and replied in English that he was not a mute.

Young Lillie asked him again if he could speak Chinese and Duckling replied – in Chinese – that he could.

Young Lillie laughed and said, ‘Your Chinese is as bad as my English. Did you learn it from Mr Auslander?’

Duckling nodded again.

Young Lillie said, ‘Don’t nod.’

Duckling said, ‘Fine.’

Young Lillie said, ‘It is many years since I last used my English and it is terribly rusty. In the future we had better speak Chinese together.’

Duckling said in Chinese, ‘Fine.’

Young Lillie walked over to the table, sat down in the director’s chair and lit a cigarette. He asked, ‘How old are you?’

‘Twelve.’

‘Apart from getting you to read these books, did Mr Auslander teach you anything else?’

‘No.’

‘You mean that Mr Auslander never taught you how to interpret dreams? He was famous for that.’

‘He taught me that.’

‘Are you any good?’

‘Yes.’

‘I had a dream last night. Would you interpret it for me?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I only interpret my own dreams.’

‘Well, why don’t you tell me what kind of things you dream about . . . ’

‘I dream about all sorts of things.’

‘Have you seen me in your dreams?’

‘I have.’

‘Do you know who I am?’

‘Yes.’

‘Who?’

‘You are a member of the eighth generation of the Rong family to live here and you were born in 1883. You are the twenty-first in your generation. Your name is Rong Xiaolai and your style name is Dongqian, and your soubriquet is Zeshi. People call you ‘Young Lillie’. You are the son of the founder of N University, Old Lillie. You graduated from the mathematics department at N University in 1906; in 1912 you went to the United States to study, and obtained a Master’s degree from MIT. In 1926 you returned to your Alma Mater to teach and you have been there ever since. You are now the vice-chancellor of N University and a full professor in the department of mathematics.’

‘You know a lot about me.’

‘I know a lot about all the members of the Rong family.’

‘Did Mr Auslander teach you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did he teach you anything else?’

‘No.’

‘Do you go to school?’

‘No.’

‘Would you like to go to school?’

‘I don’t know; I have never really thought about it.’

The water in the pot had now come to the boil again and filled the room with its warmth – that and the smell of cooking. The old man stood up with the intention of going out into the garden. The child thought that he was leaving and called out to him to wait a moment. He said that Mr Auslander had left something for him. As he spoke, he walked in the direction of the bed. He pulled a paper parcel out from underneath the bed and handed it to him with the words: ‘Daddy told me that when you came, I was to give this to you.’

‘Daddy?’ The old man thought for a moment. ‘You mean Mr Auslander?’

‘Yes.’

‘What is this?’ The old man picked up the parcel.

‘When you open it, sir, you will see.’

Whatever was inside had been wrapped up in a couple of layers of brown paper and looked pretty large. This however turned out to be a mistaken impression, for when all the paper wrappings had been removed, they revealed a statuette of the Bodhisattva Guanyin that you could hold in the palm of your hand. It had been carved from muttonfat jade and had a single dark sapphire set between its eyes as the
urna
, the Buddhist ‘Third Eye’. Holding it delicately in his hand the old man scrutinized it carefully; immediately he sense a kind of icy pure aura spreading from his palm to the rest of his body – a testament to the high quality of the jade. The workmanship was also excellent; the combination of these two factors suggested that this statuette had a long and complex history. He was sure that such a remarkable treasure must be worth a very great deal of money. The old man thought the matter over, looking at the child. Then he said with a sigh, ‘I hardly knew Mr Auslander. Why should he leave me any bequest at all?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You know, this statuette is worth a lot of money. You should keep it.’

‘No.’

‘Mr Auslander took you in when you were only a baby and he loved you as if you were his own son; you ought to take it.’

‘No.’

‘You need it more than I do.’

‘No.’

‘Or is it that Mr Auslander was worried that you would be cheated if you tried to sell it yourself and wanted me to do it for you?’

‘No.’

While he was speaking, the old man’s eyes happened to fall on the outer wrapping paper and he noticed that it was covered in figures, line after line of calculations, as if someone were working out a very difficult sum. When he spread out all the papers and looked at them, he realized that they were all the same, covered in line after line of mathematical calculations. Changing the subject completely, the old man now asked: ‘Did Mr Auslander teach you mathematics?’

‘No.’

‘Who wrote this then?’

‘I did.’

‘Why?’

‘I was trying to work out how many days Daddy lived for . . . ’

The disease that finally killed Mr Auslander first manifested itself in his throat. Maybe this was some kind of karmic revenge for all those years he had spent interpreting other people’s dreams – everything that he had gained in life had come to him thanks to his elegant turn of speech; likewise all the harm he had suffered was brought about by others taking umbrage at his choice of words. Even before he started composing his last letter to Young Lillie, he had already pretty much lost the ability to speak. It was this that made him feel that death was coming and that he needed to start making some plans for Duckling’s future. Every morning during those silent days, Duckling would put a cup of pear blossom steeped in water by the old man’s bed and he would be woken by the faint breath of its perfume; as he watched the pale dried flowers would uncurl in the warm liquid. It made him feel calm and relaxed. These pear blossoms seemed to alleviate the pain he felt from his badly-set bones; he came to think of them as the one thing that had enabled him to live to this great age. When he had first begun collecting these flowers, it was simply because he was bored. After a time, he began to appreciate the startling clarity of their colour, not to mention their delicate texture. He would collect the flowers and sun them under the eaves. When they were completely dry, he would put them in his pillow or on top of his desk. Every time he smelled their fragrance, it seemed as if he were prolonging their flowering season by keeping them by him.

Since he only had one eye and his legs had never recovered properly after they were broken, he found it difficult to get around. As a result, he spent much of his life sitting in his chair. As time went on, he gradually became sick with constipation; at its worst he felt that there was no point in him being alive. One year, at the beginning of winter, his constipation returned. He used all his regular methods: every morning when he first woke up he would down a large bowl of cold water, then he would continue drinking more in the hope of giving himself a stomach-ache. This time the constipation proved particularly obdurate – for a couple of days he downed cup after cup of water, but with no sign of the slightest reaction from his guts. He had only succeeded in making himself even more sick; he felt terribly unwell and hopeless. One evening he came back from the town having picked up his medicine – fumbling round in the dark he picked up the bowl of cold water waiting for him by the front door and drained it to the dregs. Because he drank it so quickly, it was only afterwards that he realized there had been a strange flavour to the water – at the same time he felt that something or other soft had gone down his throat with the liquid – a horrifying experience. When he lit his oil lamp, he discovered that the bowl was full of sodden dried pear petals. Maybe they had been blown there by the wind, or maybe they had been disturbed by a rat. He had never heard that pear-blossom could be used to make a drink and so he waited uneasily to find out what happened next – he was even ready to discover that they were going to kill him. But before he had managed to finish brewing up his medicine, he felt a pain deep in his guts. Soon, he realized that this was the pain he had been hoping for day and night. He knew that he would be okay. After a long and resonant fart he headed off to the lavatory. When he returned, he was completely relaxed.

On previous occasions, any relief from constipation had been followed by a period of serious stomach inflammation. Thus his stoppage of the bowels would normally be followed by dreadful diarrhoea, as if he had to proceed through these two extremes to recover. This time, however, he seemed to have escaped from this vicious circle – his constipation relieved, he made a complete recovery without any other symptoms or problems. He now started to become seriously interested in the medicinal properties of pear-blossom water. What had begun as a pure accident now struck him as the inner workings of divine providence. From this time onwards, he would brew himself a cup of pear blossoms the way that other people make themselves a cup of tea – the more he drank the more he enjoyed it. Every year when the pear trees flowered, he would feel an incomparable joy and sense of satisfaction. Picking these fragrant and delicate blossoms, he would feel as if he were slowly recovering his long-lost health. Under the stress of long-term pain, he had dreamed every night of the pear flowers bursting open in the sunlight, floating through the wind and the rain. It was a sign that he hoped that God would let him die, would let him leave with the pear blossoms.

Early one morning, the old man called Duckling to his bedside and gestured that he wanted a piece of paper and a pen. He wrote down the following message: ‘When I am dead, I want you to put pear flowers in my coffin.’ That evening, he called Duckling back to his bedside and again demanded paper and pen, so that he could give more detailed instructions: ‘I am eighty-nine years old and I would like eighty-nine pear flowers to be buried with me.’ The next morning, he called Duckling to his bedside again and once supplied with paper and pen, he made his wishes even more precise: ‘Work out how many days there are in eighty-nine years and then bury me with that number of pear flowers.’ Perhaps the old man was confused and fearful in the face of his oncoming death, for at the moment that he wrote these increasingly complex instructions, he seemed to forget completely that he had never taught Duckling any mathematics.

Although he had never formally been taught any mathematics, Duckling was quite capable of this kind of simple addition. It is part of life, everyday stuff: a moderately intelligent child, even if you don’t formally teach them this kind of skill, will still be able to manage it. If you look at it from that point of view, then Duckling had already received as much instruction in addition and subtraction as he needed, since every year when the pear blossoms began to fall from the trees, Mr Auslander would collect them and afterwards get Duckling to count them. When he had come up with the correct number, it would be noted on the wall. Later on, Mr Auslander might well get him to count them again and the total was written up a second time on the wall. That way, by the time that the flowers had all fallen, Duckling’s addition and subtraction had had a thorough work-out, not to mention his understanding of numbers and decimal places. However, that was all that he had learned. Now he was going to have to rely on this strictly limited experience to calculate how many days his daddy had been alive, based on the information that old Mr Auslander had prepared for his tombstone, including the time and place of his birth. Because he had such limited mathematical experience, the calculation took ages – it was a whole day before he got a result. Dusk was falling when Duckling walked up to the bed and showed the result of his lengthy calculation to his daddy, who by that time no longer even had the strength to nod his head. He touched the boy’s hand gently and then closed his eyes for the last time. It was for this reason that Duckling had no idea whether the answer he had obtained was right or not. When he realized that Young Lillie was looking at his workings out, for the very first time he began to understand that this relationship might be very important to him, so he began to feel nervous and uncomfortable.

Duckling had used three sheets of paper for working out his calculations. Even though they were not numbered, when Young Lillie looked at the uppermost page, he realized immediately that it was also the first page. The first page began like this:

One year: 365 days.

Two years: 365 + 365 = 730 days.

Three years: 730 + 365 = 1,095 days.

Four years: 1,095 + 365 = 1,460 days.

Five years: 1,490 + 365 = 1,825 days.

Having got this far, Young Lillie realized that Duckling didn’t know how to do multiplication. Since he did not know multiplication, he had no choice but to use this cumbersome method. Having added up year by year until he reached the total for eighty-nine years, he worked out the figure of 32, 485 days. From this figure he had deducted 253 days, leaving a final total of 32, 232 days.

Duckling asked, ‘Am I right?’

Young Lillie realized that Duckling was wrong, because of course not every year consists of 365 days. According to the solar calendar, every four years you have a leap year, which consists of 366 days. On the other hand he also realized that it cannot have been easy for a child of twelve to work through such a long and tiresome calculation without making any mistakes. He didn’t want to upset him, so he said that the answer was correct and praised him for all the trouble that he had gone to:

‘You are absolutely right about one thing. By basing your calculations on the number of days in a whole year, starting from the day of his birth, yosaved yourself a lot of trouble. If you think about it, if you had started your count on the first of January, it would have left you with two incomplete years at the beginning and end of Mr Auslander’s life to include in your final count, whereas this way you only have to think about the number of days that he lived passed his birthday. That really has saved you a lot of effort.’

‘But now I have worked out a much easier way of doing it,’ Duckling said.

‘How?’

‘I don’t know what it is called, but look at this.’

As he spoke, Duckling fished another couple of pages out from under his bed for the old man to look at.

These pieces of paper were of a completely different size and texture from the previous ones, and Duckling’s handwriting was also somewhat altered, indicating that it must have been written at some other time. Duckling said that he wrote it after Daddy’s funeral. Young Lillie looked at it and realized that the left-hand column contained addition as before, while the right-hand column contained the method of calculation that he did not know the name for:

One year: 365 days. 356 .1 = 365. Two years: 365 + 365 = 730 days. 365 .2 = 730. Three years: 730 + 365 = 1,095 days 365 .3 =1,095.

As I am sure you will have realized, Duckling was using a dot to indicate multiplication – he did not know the proper sign and hence had to invent one of his own. Using this dual method of calculation, he had worked out a total for the first twenty years. But from the twenty-first year, he swapped the order of the two methods, giving his dot multiplication first and the addition second:

Twenty-one years: 365 .21 = 7,665 days.

7,300 + 365 = 7,665 days.

At this stage, Young Lillie noticed that the figure of 7,665 obtained by multiplication had been corrected; the original answer had been something like 6,565. After that the total for every year was worked out the same way. The dot method came first and the addition came second, furthermore the result obtained by multiplication sometimes showed signs of having been corrected, to fit with the figure obtained by addition. However, the figure obtained by multiplication for the first twenty years of old Mr Auslander’s life did not seem to have been corrected. That meant two things:

1. For calculating the first twenty years, Duckling was using addition as his primary method, while his dot principle was just a kind of decoration, which he seemed to regard as something that could not necessarily stand independently. On the other hand, from twenty-one years on, he was using multiplication only, with the addition functioning merely as mathematical proof.

2. To begin with he had not completely mastered multiplication and thus made mistakes, hence there were corrections to be found in his workings. However, later on, once he came to understand multiplication fully, the corrections gradually disappeared.

He carried on multiplying one year at a time until he reached forty, and then there was a sudden leap to eighty-nine, which by his dot method of calculation he worked out to be 32,485 days, a figure from which he then subtracted 253 days to reach a final total of 32,232 days, exactly as before. He had drawn a circle around this number, to make sure that it caught the eye and stood out from all the other figures.

There was one final page of workings, which appeared very confused, but Young Lillie realized at first glance that he was trying to work out the principles of multiplication. At the very bottom of the page, the rules were clearly set out. As the old man looked at this page, he could not stop himself from reciting it out loud –

Once one is one.

Once two is two.

Once three is three . . .

Two twos are four.

Two threes are six.

Two fours are eight . . .

Three threes are nine.

Three fours are twelve.

Three fives are fifteen.

Three sixes are eighteen . . .

When he had finished, Young Lillie looked silently at the child, as he was enveloped by a very strange and unfamiliar sense of uncertainty. The quiet little room still seemed to resound with the echoes of his chanting; as he concentrated, he felt warmed and comforted. It was at that moment he decided that he had to take the child away. He said to himself, the war has gone on for years now and there is no end in sight; at any moment, with the very best motives at heart, an unconsidered action might bring disaster down upon me and those dearest to me. But this child is a genius and if I don’t take him away with me right now, I am going to regret it for the rest of my life.

Before the end of the summer holidays, Young Lillie received a telegram from the provincial capital to say that the university would begin classes again in the autumn. They hoped that he would return as soon as possible to prepare to begin teaching. Once he received this telegram, Young Lillie thought that he might well not return to take charge, but that he would have to bring back a new student for them. He called out to the major-domo and told him that he was leaving. When he finished, he gave the man a fistful of notes. The majordomo thanked him, imagining that this was a tip.

Young Lillie said, ‘This is not a tip. I want you to do something for me.’

‘What is it?’ asked the major-domo.

‘Take Duckling into the village and buy him two sets of clothes.’

The major-domo just stood there, thinking that he must have misheard.