I had put my hand in my pocket to get the key, but I let go of it again. I asked myself whether it would be suitable to just let her into my room, given that I didn’t know the first thing about her. The answer was negative. I asked her to go downstairs to the main lobby instead. She didn’t seem to be too happy about that idea, and on the way downstairs she suggested that we go to the professors’ accommodation block, where there was a coffee shop catering specially to foreign visitors.

‘I’m not a foreign visitor,’ I said.

‘We can pretend that you are.’ She then said something in a foreign language, very fluently, but I don’t know what language she was speaking.

I was still hesitating when she took out a 10-yuan note and said, ‘My treat. Surely you aren’t going to say no!’

She didn’t seem like a real person to me, more like someone out of a book. Both the way she spoke and the way she behaved made me feel really uncomfortable. In the end, though, I did go with her, and the whole way along the road I kept saying to myself, ‘If she tries anything, you’re getting the hell out of here.’

She seemed to understand what I was thinking, and said as if trying to cheer me up, ‘Don’t keep looking at me all bug-eyed, as if I were a wild animal or something. I’m not wild at all, just independent. Round here, everyone else is alike, cut from the same cloth, but I am unique. That’s why it’s worth your while making my acquaintance.’

In the darkness, I felt that her way of speaking seemed very artificial, and she threw in a lot of foreign words. It gave me goose-bumps to listen to her. I asked myself, who the hell was this woman?

7

Her name was Huang Yiyi, and just as she said, she was a patriotic intellectual. Before coming back to China she had worked for the world-famous mathematician John von Neumann, and she was a fairly well-known mathematician in her own right. I remember that Anderov once told me that von Neumann was then the best cryptographer in the whole world, and it was as if he had two completely different ways of thinking, one Eastern and one Western … At that time he was the only person in the world who had cracked both European and Asian ciphers. He had accepted a number of Asian students, so that they would give him insight into the way that their minds worked … Some people said that he was even cleverer than Einstein, that he was the last of the great mathematicians.