You can guess how we spent the next month. Everyone in our special working group was entirely caught up in the work of the calculations division, and although they came into work they couldn’t concentrate on anything. It was as if they were in a trance: the only thing they could think about was the exercise going on in the Calculations Office; their ears were filled with the sound of moving abacus beads, like the swish of nuts being swirled across a roasting pan. During this time, even I who am normally so serious and calm found myself becoming increasingly restless; in the course of a single day I would go many times to stare out of the window in the direction of the quiet single-storey building housing the team working on the calculations – just like a shipwrecked sailor on a desert island, scanning the horizon for the ship that would rescue him.

Of course, Huang Yiyi suffered the worst. She couldn’t eat, she couldn’t sleep, she kept running round to the Calculations Office to look at their results. She was so nervous that she almost stopped laughing, and when I cracked a joke with her, she hardly reacted. She just lifted the corners of her mouth, like a sleepwalker whose soul is far away. I saw that she was getting thinner day by day, and I found myself feeling a kind of wordless sympathy for her. One day, as I was going upstairs with her, I don’t know exactly what happened but her foot seemed to give way under her and she fell down the stairs. I helped her up and took her to my office, telling her that she ought to relax; this exercise wasn’t that important. She saw that I had tears in my eyes, but nevertheless she shouted at me as though she was trying to pick a quarrel. ‘How can I not take it seriously? This is the first time I have suggested a premise for cracking RECOVERY since my arrival at Unit 701. If Comrade Chen is right, everyone is going to laugh at me!’

That was the very first time I felt like taking her in my arms and hugging her tight. Of course I immediately realized that was a really bad idea; and my emotions were under iron control, thanks to my love for Xiaoyu and my long experience as a secret agent. At all times and in all places my self-control protected me. I knew that nothing in this world is perfect, and we had to accept pain and suffering.

On day twenty-nine, the exercise reached its final conclusion. Everyone in the special working group rushed to the Calculations Office, to wait for the final result. On the dais in the office, the data was piled up in heaps two or three feet high, but there were still a couple of people there reciting numbers without stopping, like the traders at a stock market: ‘1234567890. 0187654329. 2345678901.’