Decoded (4 page)

‘Once you have done that, I will give you your tip,’ said Young Lillie.

A couple of days later, when the major-domo came for his tip, Young Lillie said, ‘You had better help Duckling to pack: we are leaving tomorrow.’

As you might imagine, yet again the major-domo just stood there, thinking that he must have misheard.

Young Lillie had to repeat what he had said all over again.

The following morning, just as the sky was getting light, all the dogs in the Rong family mansion suddenly started barking. First one started barking and then the next joined in, until the cacophony was indescribable and wrenched every member of the household – masters and servants – out of bed, to peer at what was going on outside through the cracks in the doors. Thanks to the lamp that the majordomo held, the residents of the Rong mansion were treated to such an amazing sight that they were hardly able to believe their eyes. They saw Duckling in a new suit of clothes, carrying the ox-hide suitcase that Mr Auslander had arrived with all those years before, walking silently in Young Lillie’s wake, trying desperately to keep up. He seemed scared, and moved like a bewildered little ghost. Because it was so amazing, they none of them dared believe their own eyes. When the major-domo got back from the docks, they learned from him that it was only too true.

There were many questions. Where was Young Lillie taking him? Why was he taking him away? Would Duckling ever come back? Why was Young Lillie so kind to Duckling? And so on and so forth. The major-domo had two answers to all these questions.

To his masters he said: ‘I don’t know.’

To the junior servants he said: ‘Who the fuck knows!’

If the horse made the world smaller and boat travel made the world larger, then the internal combustion engine made the world magical. A couple of months later, when the Japanese Army advanced from the provincial capital in the direction of Tongzhen, the advance motorbike division arrived within a couple of hours. They were the very first motors ever to be seen on the road between the provincial capital and Tongzhen and their speed made people wonder whether Heaven might not have finally taken pity on the Foolish Old Man who wanted to move a mountain and shifted the entire mountain range that lay between them out of the way. Up until that moment, the quickest way to go between the city and Tongzhen was to travel by horse. If you could find a horse with a good turn of speed and applied the whip when necessary, it was possible to make the journey in about seven or eight hours. Some decades earlier, Young Lillie had always made this journey by horse-drawn carriage: though this was of course slower than going on horseback, nevertheless, providing the driver pressed on, it was quite possible to reach your destination by dusk if you set out at dawn. However, now that he was getting on, Young Lillie could no longer cope with the jolting that entailed and so he had to travel by boat. The journey to Tongzhen took two days and two nights, but that was moving against the current. Coming back wouldn’t take nearly so long, but it would still be at least one day and one night.

Sitting on the boat, Young Lillie started to worry about the boy’s name. Even when the boat travelled the final stretch before the provincial capital, he still hadn’t come to any decision. Once he had started thinking about it, he discovered what a tricky problem this was. The fact is, Young Lillie was confronted with exactly the same problems that old Mr Auslander had faced when he was asked to pick a name for the baby: this was not a difficulty that had resolved itself with time. Having thought about it carefully, Young Lillie decided to put all other considerations on one side and give the boy a name suitable for someone who had been born in Tongzhen and grown up in Tongzhen, and that way he came up with two names, both of which seemed to him a little forced: Jinzhen, meaning ‘Golden Sincerity’ and Tongzhen, meaning ‘Childlike Sincerity’. He decided to let the boy decide for himself which one of the two he would prefer.

‘I don’t care,’ said Duckling.

‘In that case,’ said Young Lillie, ‘I will pick for you. Do you think that Jinzhen would be all right?’

‘Fine,’ replied Duckling.

‘In that case I’ll be called Jinzhen.’

‘I hope that you live up to your name in future,’ said Young Lillie.

‘Fine,’ Duckling replied, ‘I will try and live up to my name.’

‘That means I hope that in the future you will shine like gold,’ said
Young Lillie.

‘Fine,’ Duckling replied, ‘I will try to shine like gold.’ After a moment, Young Lillie asked another question: ‘Do you
like your name?’

‘Yes,’ said Duckling.

‘I would like to change one of the characters in your name,’ said
Young Lillie. ‘Would that be okay by you?’

‘Okay,’ said Duckling.

‘I haven’t even told you which character I want to change,’ said
Young Lillie, ‘so why do you just agree?’

‘Which character?’ Duckling asked.

‘I want to change the character
zhen
meaning “sincerity” to the
zhen
that means “pearl”,’ said Young Lillie. ‘Is that okay with you?’

‘Okay,’ replied Duckling. ‘The
zhen
that means pearl.’

‘Do you know why I have changed that character in your name?’
Young Lillie asked.

‘No,’ said Duckling.

‘Would you like to know?’

‘Well . . . I don’t know . . . ’

To tell the truth, the reason that Young Lillie wanted to change
the character in his name was purely out of superstition. In Tongzhen, just like the rest of the Jiangnan region, there was a popular saying: ‘Even the devil is scared of a feminine man.’ That means that when a man has some feminine quality, he has both
yin
and
yang
in his nature and the two complement each other. Strength is complemented by pliability. They thought that this was the way to produce the very best kind of man – a truly outstanding individual. It was because of this that local customs developed a million ways to balance
yin
and
yang
, including the names that they gave to their sons. A father who hoped for great things from his son would often deliberately pick a girl’s name for him, in the hope that this would guarantee him a sterling future. Young Lillie wanted to tell Duckling this, but then he decided that it would not be quite appropriate. After hesitating a bit, he realized it would be best if he kept his reasoning to himself. So in the end he just said: ‘Right, that’s decided then. You are going to be called Jinzhen, the
zhen
that means “pearl”.’

By that time, the skyline of C City was just emerging on the horizon.

Once they had arrived at the docks, Young Lillie called for a rickshaw, but he did not go home. Instead he went straight to a very well-respected primary school near the West Gate, to find the headmaster. The headmaster was a man named Cheng. This man had once been a pupil at the high school associated with N University, and when Young Lillie was a student – and later as a junior instructor at the university – he would often teach classes at the high school. Cheng had a remarkably lively character and was much admired by his fellow students; he had made a deep impression on Young Lillie. When he finished high school, his grades were such that he could easily have gone on to university, but by that time he had been bewitched by the uniforms of the National Revolutionary Army. When he came to say goodbye to Young Lillie, he was already shouldering a gun. In the depths of winter two years later, Cheng came back to see Young Lillie again. He was still wearing the uniform of the National Revolutionary Army, but this time he did not carry a gun. Looking more closely, Young Lillie realized that it was not only the rifle that was missing, the arm that was needed to hold it was also gone, leaving an empty sleeve. As Cheng manoeuvred himself awkwardly into place, Young Lillie felt more than a little uncomfortable. He gingerly took hold of his remaining hand – the left one – and realized that it was just as strong as normal. He asked whether he could write with that hand and Cheng said that he could. Young Lillie then provided him with a letter of introduction to a newly established primary school near the West Gate, where he could train as a teacher. This gave the wretched man a new lease of life. Because of his handicap, when he first became a teacher, everyone called him One-Arm. Now that he was the headmaster, people still called him One-Arm, because he had single-handedly made the school was it was.

A couple of months earlier, Young Lillie and his wife had hidden out at the school when the battle raging around the city was at its height – they had lived in the shed attached to the carpentry workshop. Today, the moment that Young Lillie clapped eyes on One-Arm, he said, ‘Is the shed where I used to live still empty?’

‘It is,’ replied One-Arm. ‘There are just a couple of basketballs and footballs in there.’

‘I’d like it if this young man could stay there,’ said Young Lillie. He pointed to Duckling.

‘Who is he?’ asked One-Arm.

‘Jinzhen, your new student,’ said Young Lillie.

From that day onwards, no one called him Duckling any more; everyone called him Jinzhen.

‘Jinzhen!’

‘Jinzhen!’

This new name marked the beginning of Duckling’s life in the city and everything that happened to him after that; it was also the end of his connection with Tongzhen.

As for what happened over the course of the next couple of years, the most reliable witness is Young Lillie’s oldest daughter, Rong Yinyi.

Everyone at N University called Miss Rong the Master; Master Rong, but I do not know whether this was the result of their fond memories of her father, or out of respect for her unusual position. She never married, but that is not because she never fell in love. Rather, it is because she fell in love too deeply, too painfully. The story goes that when she was young she had a boyfriend, a brilliant student from the physics department of N University, specializing in wireless technology. Supposedly he could make a triple waveband radio for you from scratch in the space of a couple of hours. Once the War of Resistance broke out, given that N University was a hotbed of patriotism in C City, it is hardly surprising that every month there were students abandoning their studies to join the army, rushing headlong for the front line. One of the students who left was Master Rong’s boyfriend. For the first couple of years after he joined the army, he and Master Rong were able to keep in touch, but later on they gradually lost contact. The last letter she ever received from him was sent from the city of Changsha in Hunan province in the spring of 1941. It explained that he was now engaged in top-secret research work for the military and that he would temporarily have to break off contact with his family and friends. He wrote over and over again about how much he loved her and how he hoped that she would wait for him. The last line was the most moving: ‘Darling, wait for me to come back to you. The day that the Japanese are defeated will be our wedding day!’ Master Rong waited until the Japanese were defeated and then she waited until the Liberation, but still he did not come back – there wasn’t even word that he had died. She heard nothing until 1953 when someone returned from Hong Kong bringing a message for her, saying that he had gone to Taiwan many years earlier and was now married with children. He told her to find someone else.

That was the end result of all Master Rong’s decades of devotion and waiting. It goes without saying that it was a terrible shock to her and she never really got over it. Ten years ago, when I went to N University to meet her, she had just retired from the position of head of the department of mathematics. Our conversation began with a discussion of a family photograph hanging in her living room. There were five people in the photograph. Young Lillie and his wife were in the front row, sitting down, and standing behind them was Master Rong, then in her twenties, with her hair in a shoulder-length bob. Standing to her left was her younger brother, wearing glasses, and on her right was her younger sister with her hair in pigtails, aged maybe seven or eight. This photograph was taken in the summer of 1936, just as Master Rong’s younger brother was getting ready to go abroad to study. The picture was taken to commemorate the occasion. Because of the war, her younger brother did not come back home until 1945; during that time the family lost and then gained a member. The person they lost was the little sister, who had died in the epidemic the year before; the person they gained was Jinzhen, who joined the family that summer, just a few weeks after she died. As Master Rong explained:

My little sister died during the summer holidays, when she was just seventeen.

My mother and I didn’t even know of Jinzhen’s existence until after she was dead. Daddy had him hidden in the house of Mr Cheng, the headmaster of a primary school near the West Gate. We didn’t have much to do with Mr Cheng, so even though Daddy was hoping to keep this all a secret from us, he didn’t bother to specifically warn him not to mention it to us. One day, Mr Cheng came to the house. I don’t know where he had heard that my sister had died, but he came to pay a visit of condolence. My father and I happened to be away from home that day, so only my mother was there to greet him and as they talked, Daddy’s secret came out. When he came back, Mummy asked him what was going on, and he told her everything he knew about all the misfortunes this boy had already suffered in his short life, his remarkable intelligence, and the old foreign gentleman’s request. Perhaps it was because Mummy had been so deeply affected by my sister’s death that she just burst into tears when she heard about his unhappiness. She said to Daddy: ‘Yinzhi (that was my little sister’s name) has gone and this boy needs a family. Bring him to live here.’

That was how my little brother Zhendi joined us – Zhendi was Jinzhen’s nickname, you see.

My mother and I both called him Zhendi, only Daddy called him Jinzhen. Zhendi called Mother ‘Mummy’, but he called Daddy ‘Professor’ and me ‘Sis’, so everything was kind of topsy-turvy. Of course, if you looked at the family tree, I would be one generation senior to him, so by rights he should have called me ‘Auntie’.

To tell the truth, I didn’t like Zhendi one little bit when he first turned up. He didn’t smile at all and wouldn’t speak to anyone. He moved round the house in absolute silence, like a ghost. He turned out to have all sorts of disgusting habits, like belching while eating. His hygiene was also appalling: he didn’t wash his feet at night and he would just take his shoes off and throw them down by the stairs, filling the dining room and the corridor with a foul stench. We were living in the house that my father had inherited from Grandpa, a kind of Western-style villa. There was a kitchen and dining room on the ground floor and all the bedrooms were upstairs. Every time I came down the stairs from my bedroom for meals, I would see his rotten and stinking old shoes and think about the way that he belched over his food, and I would find myself not really wanting anything to eat at all. Of course the problem with his shoes was sorted out almost immediately: Mummy told him that he ought pay attention to this and make sure that he washed his feet and put on clean socks every day – after that his socks were cleaner than anyone’s. He was a very capable boy: he knew how to cook, wash his clothes, build a fire out of coal-dust briquettes; he even knew how to sew – in fact he was much better at that kind of thing than I was. Of course, this was all to do with the way that he had been brought up: he had learned how to do all sorts of things. The belching and farting turned out to be much more difficult habits to break him of. Habits can be broken eventually, but in this case it turned out that he had very serious stomach problems, which were also the reason why he was so thin. Daddy told me that his stomach problems were the results of drinking the pearl-blossom tea that Mr Auslander was so fond of day in and day out: that kind of thing was all very well for an old man, but how could it possibly be considered suitable for a growing child! To tell the truth, once we found out about his stomach problems, he ate more medicine than food in our house. He could only eat one little bowl of rice per meal, less than a cat, and even so after just a mouthful or two he would start belching.

One day, Zhendi forgot to lock the door of the lavatory and I walked in, not realizing that it was already occupied. That really wasn’t acceptable. As far as I was concerned, that was the last straw and now I wanted him out of our house. I told Mummy and Daddy that I couldn’t stand it any longer and I wanted him to start boarding at school. I told them that even though he was a relative, that was no reason for him to be living in our home and that lots of other boys lived as boarders at the school. Daddy didn’t say a word – he let Mummy do the talking. Mummy said that it wouldn’t be right to make him leave when he had only just arrived; she said that once term had started, then it might be all right for him to become a boarder.

Daddy then chipped in and said, ‘Okay, once term has started he can stay at school as a boarder.’

Mummy said, ‘We will go and fetch him so that he can spend every weekend here, because he ought to feel that this is still his home.’ Daddy agreed to that. So everything was decided.

However, that is not at all what happened in the end . . .
[To be continued]

One evening, towards the end of the summer holidays, Master Rong happened to mention at the dinner table something that she had read in the newspapers earlier that day: the previous summer many parts of the country had suffered one of the worst droughts since records began, with the result that in some cities there were more beggars than there were troops. Her mother sighed and said that the previous year had been a double leap year – those years always saw terrible natural disasters. In the final analysis it was always the peasants that suffered the most. Jinzhen did not often open his mouth and so Mrs Lillie always did her best to bring him into the conversation. It was for this reason that she made a point of asking him if he knew what a double leap year was. When he shook his head, Mrs Lillie explained that it came about when a leap year in the solar calendar coincided with one in the lunar calendar; when the two leap years came together. Seeing that he didn’t really understand what she was talking about, Mrs Lillie asked him, ‘Do you know what a leap year is?’

He shook his head again, without making a sound. He was that sort of person: if it was possible to express something by any other means, he would not open his mouth. Immediately Mrs Lillie began to explain to him what a leap year was and how it was dealt with in first the solar calendar and then the lunar calendar, and so on and so forth. When she had finished, he just stared at Young Lillie as if he had been pole-axed, waiting for him to confirm what his wife had just said.

‘You mean my calculations were wrong?’ Jinzhen went bright red in the face and looked as if he was about to burst into tears.

‘Your calculations?’ Young Lillie did not know what he was talking about.

‘Daddy’s age – I thought that every year was 365 days long.’

‘That is not quite right . . . ’ Before Young Lillie had finished speaking, Jinzhen broke down into floods of tears.

It proved impossible to console him. Whatever people said to him to try and cheer him up, it did not make the blindest bit of difference. In the end Young Lillie had simply had enough and angrily thumped his fist down on the dining table, shouting at him to control himself. Although he did stop crying at that point, it was clear that he was still terribly upset. He was holding onto his thighs, digging his nails in, as if his life depended on it. Young Lillie ordered him to keep his hands above the table. Afterwards, he spoke to him very sternly, though he was clearly intending his words to console the boy. He said, ‘What are you making that kind of racket for? I still haven’t finished speaking. When I have, then you can see if you still want to cry.’

He continued, ‘When I said that you were wrong just now, I was speaking theoretically – the fact is that you ignored the existence of leap years. On the other hand if you look at it from the point of view of mathematics, it would be impossible to say that you were wrong, because there are acceptable errors in any calculation.

‘According to my knowledge, the time it takes the earth to complete one orbit of the sun is three hundred and sixty-five days, five hours, forty-eight minutes and forty-six seconds. So why do we need leap years? There is a simple reason: according to the solar calendar, every year there are five extra hours, whereby every four years you need a leap year which consists of three hundred and sixty-six days. However, as I am sure you will realize if you think about it, if you calculate that ordinary years consist of three hundred and sixty-five days and that each leap year contains three hundred and sixty-six days, you are still not going to obtain a completely accurate calculation. It is convenient for most ordinary purposes to let the mistake go by; in fact, it would be impossible to work the solar calendar without this acceptable error. What I am trying to tell you is that even if you had allowed for leap years, your calculation would still be wrong.

‘Now you can go away and work out how many leap years Mr Auslander lived through during his eighty-nine years and then add that number of days to your original calculation. Then you can work out how big the difference is between your original calculation and the new one. In a calculation involving figures of more than four places of decimals, the acceptable margin for error is normally set at 0.01 per cent; any more than that and you have made a mistake in your calculations. Right: now you tell me, is your mistake within the acceptable margin for error?’

Mr Auslander died in a leap year at the age of eighty-nine, thus he had lived through twenty-two leap years: that does not sound many, but it is also not a few. Adding one day for every leap year means that twenty-two leap years is equivalent to twenty-two days. Adding that to the more than 30,000 days that Mr Auslander had spent on this earth meant that it was a mistake well within the acceptable margin of error. The reason why Young Lillie made such a point of this is that he wanted Jinzhen to find a way to forgive himself for the mistake that he had made. Thanks to the way that Young Lillie first shouted at him and then cajoled him, Jinzhen finally calmed down.

[Transcript of the interview with Master Rong]

Later on, Daddy explained to us how Mr Auslander had asked Zhendi to work out his age. Thinking of how upset he had been, I suddenly found myself feeling moved by his obvious affection for the old foreign gentleman. On the other hand I also realized that he had an obsessive streak in his character – not to mention an inability to cope with his own mistakes. Later on we realized more and more clearly that Zhendi could on occasion be really stubborn and fierytempered; most of the time he was so quiet and kept himself to himself. He could put up with all sorts of things and simply carry on as if nothing had happened – in fact he could tolerate things that most people would find absolutely unendurable. But once an invisible line was crossed, once something had touched the most delicate part of his psyche, he would lose control very easily. This loss of control was always expressed by some extreme act. I could give you lots of examples of this kind of thing. For example, he really loved my mother and so one day he wrote a message in his own blood, completely in secret. What he said was: ‘Daddy is dead. The rest of my life is going to be devoted to looking after Mummy.’