Decoded (7 page)

Of course, it was very difficult to set yourself free from him, but the means of doing so was extremely simple. At the start of every term, in the very first class, Liseiwicz would begin by writing a tricky equation in the top right-hand corner of the blackboard. Whenever someone worked out the answer, he would be given 100 per cent as his grade, and for the rest of the term he would only have to attend class if he wished to do so. You could say that you had set yourself free for the rest of that term. Once that had happened, he would write a new equation in the same place on the blackboard and wait for a second person to get the answer right. If you solved three equations in a row, he would set a new problem for you alone, which would function as your graduation thesis. If you solved that too, whenever it happened, even if you had only attended the university for a couple of days, you would graduate with top marks, thereby completing your studies. Of course, in the nearly ten years that he had been teaching by then, there had never been anyone who had achieved anything close – even being able to solve one or two of his equations was a remarkable achievement.

Jinzhen was now sitting in Liseiwicz’s class, and because he was so short (being still only sixteen), he sat in the very front row. He could see the sharp flash and sparkle of Jan Liseiwicz’s pale blue eyes much more clearly than any of his fellows. Liseiwicz was a tall man, and standing by the teacher’s podium, he seemed even taller. His eyes were fixed on the very back row of seats. Jinzhen felt the occasional fall of drops of spittle when the professor became excited and the sudden exhalation of breath when he raised his voice. He talked about these dry, abstract mathematical notations in a voice filled with intense emotion. Sometimes he waved his arms and shouted; sometimes he walked slowly up and down, reciting. Liseiwicz, when he stood in front of the teacher’s podium, seemed like a poet, or maybe like a general. At the end of the class, he walked out without a further word. However, on this occasion, just as he was stomping out, Jan Liseiwicz’s gaze happened to fall on the thin young man seated in the front row. He had his head bent over the sheet of paper where he was working out a calculation. He seemed entirely intent upon his work, like a student in an exam hall. Two days later, Liseiwicz held his second class. When he took his place at the podium, he asked a general question: ‘Is there someone here called Jinzhen? If so, could you please raise your hand?’

Liseiwicz realized that the student who raised his hand was the young man in the front row that he had noticed when he left after his first class. He waved the couple of sheets of paper that he was holding in his hand, and asked, ‘Did you put these under my door?’

Liseiwicz said, ‘Let me tell you, this term you don’t need to attend class.’

There was a sudden uproar.

Liseiwicz seemed to be enjoying something, for he waited for the hubbub to subside with a smile on his face. Once everyone was quiet again, he wrote the equation out on the blackboard again – not in the top right-hand corner this time, but on the top left-hand side – and then he said, ‘Let us have a look at how Jinzhen solved this problem. This isn’t an extra-curricular novelty. His solution is going to be the subject of our class today.’

He began by writing out Jinzhen’s answer on the board in full and explained it from start to finish. Then he used different methods to produce three alternative solutions, so that those sitting in class felt that they were learning something through the comparison, tasting the strange joy of reaching the same goal by travelling different routes. The topic of this new class was developed step-by-step as he explained each method. When he had finished, he wrote a new question at the top right-hand corner of the blackboard and said: ‘I would be really pleased if someone can answer this before the beginning of the next class. That is the way to go: I give you a question in one class and you answer it in the next.’

That was what he said, but Liseiwicz was well aware that the chances of that happening were vanishingly small. If you were going to express it mathematically, you would need to use a very small fraction of a per cent, and even then you would be rounding the number up. Calculation often proves a slipshod method of determining the future – it shows the possible as being impossible. People often do not work as tidily as calculations: they can make the impossible possible; they can turn earth into heaven. That means that in actual fact there is no great gulf between heaven and earth: one fraction more and earth becomes heaven, one fraction less and heaven will change into earth. Liseiwicz really had no idea that this silent and impassive boy would be someone who could confuse him as to the nature of what he was looking at – having decided that it was earth, he could come up with a result demonstrating that in fact it was heaven. In other words Jinzhen solved the second problem that Professor Liseiwicz set him right away!

This problem having been solved, of course a new one had to be set. When Liseiwicz wrote this third question up on the top right-hand corner of the blackboard, he turned round and rather than speaking to the class as a whole, he directed his comments to Jinzhen alone: ‘If you can answer this problem too, then I am going to set you your personal question.’ He was talking about the question that would be the basis of his graduation thesis.

Jinzhen went to three of Professor Liseiwicz’s classes in total, lasting just over a week.

In the case of this third question, Jinzhen was not able to solve it as quickly as the previous two, so when the next class came around, he did not yet have a solution to offer. When Professor Liseiwicz finished the fourth class of that term, he stepped down from the teacher’s podium and spoke to Jinzhen: ‘I have already thought of the question for your graduation thesis. You can come and pick it up whenever you finish the previous one.’ Having said that, he walked out.

After he married, Jan Liseiwicz rented a house in Sanyuan Lane, just near the university. That was officially where he lived, but in fact he still spent a lot of time in the rooms he had occupied when he was a bachelor, living in faculty accommodation. His set was up on the third floor, a suite of rooms with a bathroom attached. He would read there, or do research – it was his library-cum-office. That afternoon, having had his siesta, Professor Liseiwicz was listening to the radio. The clumping sound of feet coming upstairs interrupted his listening. The heavy footsteps stopped right by his door, but instead of being followed by the sound of a knock, there was a susurrating noise, like a snake moving through dry leaves, as something was pushed under the door. It was a couple of sheets of paper. Liseiwicz went over and picked them up, recognizing immediately a familiar handwriting: Jinzhen. He flipped through the pages until he got to the answer: it was correct. As if he had just been flicked by a whip, he wanted to throw open the door and shout for Jinzhen to come back. However, when he got as far as the door, he hesitated for a moment and then went back to sit on the sofa. He began looking at the first page of calculations. When he had read the whole thing through carefully, Liseiwicz felt the same impulse that had propelled him towards the door. This time he rushed to the window, from which he could see Jinzhen walking slowly away. Throwing open the window, Liseiwicz bellowed at the retreating back, far in the distance. Jinzhen turned round, to discover that the foreign professor was pointing at him and yelling to come upstairs.

Jinzhen sat down opposite the foreign professor.

‘Who are you?’

‘Jinzhen.’

‘No,’ Liseiwicz was smiling, ‘I mean what family are you from? Where do you come from? Where did you go to school? I can’t help feeling that I have met you somewhere before – who are your parents?’

Jinzhen hesitated. He hardly knew how to reply.

Suddenly Liseiwicz exclaimed: ‘Ah! I remember. You look just like the woman whose statue stands in front of the main building – Miss Lillie – yes, Rong ‘Abacus’ Lillie, that’s it! Tell me, are you related to her? A son . . . no, a grandson?’

Jinzhen pointed to the papers lying on the sofa and asked as if Liseiwicz had not spoken: ‘Did I get it right?’

Liseiwicz said, ‘You still haven’t answered my question. Are you related to Miss Lillie?’

Jinzhen didn’t admit it, but he also didn’t deny it. He just said woodenly, ‘You will have to talk to Professor Rong – he’s my guardian. I don’t know anything about my parents.’

Jinzhen was simply trying to avoid discussing his relationship with Miss Lillie, which was a subject he found very difficult to deal with; but he was not expecting that this would start Liseiwicz down an even worse line of enquiry. Staring at Jinzhen suspiciously, he said: ‘Oh, really . . . So tell me, did you come up with the answer to my equations all on your own, or did someone help you?’

Jinzhen drew himself up: ‘Of course I did it myself!’

That evening, Jan Liseiwicz went in person to visit Young Lillie. When Jinzhen saw him, he imagined that the foreign professor was still concerned that he might have received help with his work. In fact, although Liseiwicz had indeed expressed such a possibility earlier in the day, he had immediately dismissed it. His reasoning for this was that if either the professor or his daughter had suggested a solution, they would never have expressed it in those terms. After Jinzhen left, Liseiwicz had reviewed his papers and was impressed all over again by his method of working. He discovered that the method of proof used was most unusual and impressive: at once naïve and yet clearly demonstrating both the grasp of logic and the intelligence of the young student who had worked it out. Liseiwicz found it hard to put his feelings into words. It was only in talking to Young Lillie that he gradually found a way to express what he thought.

Liseiwicz said, ‘The way that I think about it is this: it is as if we were asking him to go somewhere and pick up something which is located inside a maze of tunnels so dark that you cannot see the five fingers right in front of your face, and furthermore, the maze is full of crossroads, forks, and traps. If you don’t have a source of light, you can’t move even one step from your starting position. If you want to find your way through this maze of tunnels, you first need to prepare a source of light. There are lots of possible sources. You might use a torch, or an oil lamp, or a brand, or even a heap of firewood. This kid is so ignorant that he does not know about these tools and even if he did, he could not find them. So he does not go near them – he uses a mirror instead, setting it at just the right angle so that it will bend the sunlight into the tunnel that he is digging. When he comes to a bend in the tunnel, he sets up another mirror to light his path. He carries on his way, thanks to that one feeble beam of light, past all the traps and dangers. The thing that I find most mysterious is that every time he reaches a fork in the road, some kind of sixth sense seems to be telling him which is the right path to take.’

In almost a decade as colleagues, Young Lillie had never heard Jan Liseiwicz say anything so complimentary about anyone. It was very difficult to get someone like Liseiwicz to admit anyone else’s mathematical abilities, but here he was praising Jinzhen to the skies without the slightest hesitation. It was a pleasant surprise for Young Lillie, but also made him feel very strange. He thought to himself: ‘I was the very first person to discover that the boy has remarkable mathematical abilities and Liseiwicz is the second, but all he is doing is confirming my initial discovery.’ On the other hand, what could be better than confirmation of his discovery from a man like Liseiwicz? The two men talked together more and more happily.

However, on the subject of Jinzhen’s future studies, the two men were diametrically opposed. In Liseiwicz’s opinion, the boy already knew quite enough and had shown signs of such remarkable ability that he did not need any further classes on the basics. He thought that he could skip all of that and move straight on to completing his graduation thesis.

Young Lillie did not agree.

As we know, Jinzhen treated other people with an unusual degree of coldness – he liked spending time on his own. He had very little experience of interacting with his peers. This was a weak point in his character and something that would endanger him greatly in the future. Young Lillie was doing his very best to repair the damage caused by his early upbringing. In many ways, Jinzhen’s social problems and his unstable character, not to mention his unspoken animosity towards other people, would be obviated if he spent more time with other children – it would be more relaxing for him. He was by far the youngest of the students in the mathematics department and Young Lillie felt that the boy was already dangerously alienated from people of his own age. If he were forced to expand his social circle to an even larger number of adults, it could have a devastating effect on his future development. Young Lillie didn’t feel able to explain this right now; it really wasn’t the kind of thing that he wanted to talk about. It was all so complicated and the boy had the right to some privacy. All he could do was to say that he disagreed with the professor’s point of view: ‘In China we have an expression, “Iron needs time and effort to become steel.” The boy is unusually clever, it is true, but he also lacks basic ordinary knowledge. As you just said yourself, there are lots of tools that you can use to light your way and they are lying all around you, but he won’t pick up any of them – he will find some weird and unusual way to achieve something perfectly simple. In my opinion, he is not doing this on purpose; it is because he has no choice – his lack of basic knowledge forces him to become inventive. It is wonderful that in such circumstances he can still think of using a mirror to light his way, but if he spends the rest of his life using his genius in the same way, wasting his time on finding weird ways to achieve something that could perfectly well be done by simple means, he may be able to satisfy his own intellectual curiosity, but what is the point of it all? So, for the sake of his education, I think it is very important that Jinzhen spends more time studying, learning the things that other people have already done. It is only when he has a good grasp of the basics that have already been laid down that he can go on to research genuinely worthwhile unknowns. I have heard that when you came back from your travels last year, you brought back a very fine library. Last time I visited your house, I was hoping to be able to borrow a couple of your books. However, when I saw the notice pinned to the shelf saying “Don’t even bother asking”, I decided that there was no point. But I was thinking, if you would be prepared to make an exception, I would very much appreciate it if you would let Jinzhen read your books. I am sure that would be a very great help to him. As the saying goes, golden mansions are to be found in books.’