‘You’re the one that’s stupid. What do you mean by giving me a woman assistant? As the proverb says, when men and women work together neither side gets tired. There are loads of men here, and you have to find me a little girl. I know what you’re up to: you’re trying to make me feel old and ashamed of myself so that I spend less time on having fun.’

‘From this point on you’re going to have to stop that. There aren’t any men here, or any women.’

‘Well, in that case, if you’re not a man and I’m not a woman, then we don’t have to make a fuss about preserving the proper segregation between the sexes.’ As she spoke she reached out to take my hand in a very intimate way, scaring me so much that I snatched my hand away and leapt back. She saw how alarmed I looked, and burst out laughing. Her carefree, open laughter floated through the quiet mountain valley. I just wished the ground would open up and swallow me.

14

I had been told that Chen never ate lunch – not because he had a poor appetite, but because he wanted to keep his head clear. If you are hungry, the deductive capabilities of your mind are comparatively dynamic, whereas if you have eaten your fill it is easy to become dozy. When people said in the past that eating modestly makes your mind better, that must be what they meant. Comrade Chen, Chen Erhu, was a workaholic, and when he was trying to crack a cipher, he often really made himself suffer. I wished that Huang Yiyi was like that. Or to put it another way, I was worried that she wasn’t like that. She hadn’t burnt her bridges. As Anderov would say, ‘God is just when he creates each individual: clever people lack application, intellectuals like their ivory towers, people capable of doing amazing things turn out not to have the patience.’ Someone like Einstein is the exception that proves the rule: God let him have everything, with none of the usual checks and balances. I felt that Huang Yiyi was naturally very gifted, with an unusual mathematical ability. Someone like that is born to crack ciphers, but she was too fond of having fun, and that’s a real problem if you want to do great things.