That wasn’t the problem – the problem was that something an ordinary person would have the greatest difficulty in putting into words, she would say in such a relaxed, generous, unhurried, thoughtless, open, direct way, as if it were a quite ordinary question, a perfectly normal request. She would just open her mouth and out it came – that really did startle me, time and time again. I had heard of this kind of thing, but never experienced it myself before. So I felt a bit light-headed and tense, as if I were looking down into an abyss. At that moment I really thought she was a devil in an angel’s body. Whatever you might think of her, she really did have an angelic side: she was very pretty. Whether you consider her intelligence, her abilities, her position, or her good looks they were all amazing: she was absolutely dazzling. That kind of woman is very special – you might happen across one but you are not going to find one by looking for her. But at the same time I could sense a kind of evil spirit in her, passionate, coquettish, obsessive, daring, bitter, dissolute, selfish, fearless, contemptuous of all authority – shameless, like a witch.

Unique – witch – pretty – passionate – intelligent – dissolute – clickety-clack – clickety-clack … The closer we got to Unit 701, the more nervous I became: I wasn’t bringing back a cryptographer but a Western capitalist poisonous weed!

12

In a sense you could say that the people I brought back to the unit became part of me. If they did well, that reflected on me; if they did badly, that was also my problem. Thanks to my usual caution, and due to a well-founded concern about Huang Yiyi’s unconventional actions and way of speaking, after I got back to our work unit, I didn’t tell our superiors too much about her special abilities, nor did I explain that she was particularly suited to the work of cracking RECOVERY thanks to the fact that she had been von Neumann’s assistant and had spent time in Moscow. I just vaguely explained that she was a mathematician, somewhat independent and free and easy in character, but that she ought to be suited to cryptography work. It was my intention not to encourage people to expect too much of her – a bit conservative, a bit low-key – so that when she did come up with a result people would be even more amazed, which would give us the upper hand.