Notes from the Grey Tower

I stood beside the window and saw Andemund’s car drive to a stop beneath the building from the other end of the street. Upon getting out of his car, he looked up at me and smiled. He pushed the door open and sat down on the sofa, visibly exhausted. “Alan, you should have told me before coming.”

I handed him the photo. “It was hidden behind the photo frame. I thought you weren’t familiar with my mother?”

Andemund froze in the middle of undoing his tie. He took the photo, a hint of emotion flashing across his expression. I waited for an explanation, but he only took out Rousseau’s Emile from the bookcase and carefully slid the photo between its pages. 

“You shouldn’t be rummaging through my belongings.” He pushed the door open. “Tell Anne to bring you to the restaurant upstairs. You’ve waited for the whole afternoon, haven’t you? What would you like for dinner?”

I stubbornly refused to change the topic. “I’ve never seen this photo before.”

Andemund nodded. “Have you, now?”

I didn’t know what to say. I often felt a sense of helplessness when dealing with Andemund. I didn’t know why he possessed a photo of my mother from decades ago, wasn’t sure of his real identity, wasn’t even sure if he meant he loved me when he agreed to try going out with me. I slowly walked out of the door. He suddenly spoke from behind me.

“The photo was taken from when Mrs. Caster attended the ceremony where I was awarded the Pulitzer Medal.* You were only five at the time. I used to deeply respect your mother’s ideas in cryptology. She was my idol when I was young— on purely academic grounds.”

I ran into Lindon Brown in the corridor. He was carrying a stack of books when we passed by each other. Both of us were surprised by the encounter. I thought he’d been skipping on classes again since I hadn’t seen him around lately. I didn’t know he had came here.

“You solved the Waring problem?!”

Lindon carefully placed the books on the windowsill. “You solved it?!”

We furiously shook our heads at the same time. 

“There was a key piece of information missing. I wrote down all I could prove, requested the school to deliver it to the professor, and was sent here. You?”

I shrugged. “I dialed the information in as a telephone number and ended up here. I wanted to join the institute too, but Mr. Garcia didn’t want me to. Though I did crack Code S, so he might change his mind.”

Lindon stared at me strangely. “That’s impossible, Alan. You’ve never received any professional training before, so how would you be able to solve a code with such a high difficulty level? Don’t joke about matters like these.” He hurriedly picked up his books. “I have to go. Training is about to start.”

I complained to Andemund during dinner, feeling wronged. “Why did you want for Lindon and not for me?”

He contentedly kissed me on the cheek. “Darling, aren’t we going out with each other?”

“I cracked Code S. Why aren’t I allowed into Bletchley Park? —You said it was extremely difficult to solve!”

Andemund nodded and began to smile. “Hm. I did say that. But it’s only used for weather reports in the navy, so the code itself isn’t of much importance to begin with.”

“Then why did you let me decrypt it if it wasn’t important! You try decoding the bloody thing for yourself!”

His reply was painfully logical. He was too busy.

“If I put in all my effort, I would have been able to decrypt it in three weeks instead of three months. Plus, I have an entire team of cryptologists under me— but the code’s about to expire soon, and my work can’t only be focused on this code alone.” Andemund walked over, placed a hand on my shoulder, and lowered his head to kiss me.

“Alan, you’re extremely brilliant. So brilliant, in fact, that you’ve exceeded all my expectations. But you cannot enter Bletchley Park.”

This was the first time Andemund kissed me on his own accord.

His kiss was excruciatingly light. As if to allow me time to adjust, he first gently pecked me on the lips, and then delved deeper to lightly brush against my tongue. Every movement from the tip of his tongue, no matter how slight, sent my body trembling against my control. 

Andemund’s kiss was clean, reminding me of a sea breeze blowing in from an open window in a seaside villa. His clothes always had a crisp smell on them that was vaguely similar to the scent of privet leaves. I wanted to return the kiss, but was powerless to do so. The arm that held my waist was firm, and he pressed me against the window, rendering me motionless. 

I remembered that the kiss had lasted for a long time. When he finally released me, I was sorely out of breath. 

It was as if that kiss had meant farewell.

“Alan, your parents… didn’t die in a simple fire. They sent you to rural Bedfordshire to protect you. The Caster family has already sacrificed two lives for England, and I don’t wish for you to be the third. This is an organization you can’t leave once you’ve joined.”

“If it’s only because you’ve tired of mathematics, and turned to cryptography for that reason…” he said, “you can come to my mansion. There are other codes not unlike Code S that you can play around with there.”

Andemund was right. Bletchley Park was a cryptography institute operating under the MI6. It was a place that was extremely difficult to rid yourself of once you had joined. 

“Alan, the people here work for the country. Your life wouldn’t belong to yourself anymore.” Andemund’s voice was quiet. “There will be spies from other countries approaching you. If necessary, your personal life will be monitored closely. You will be disposed of secretly if you turn against the country. If your superiors suspect you of treason without evidence, you may tumble off a vehicle while traveling, and coincidentally break your neck from the fall. All of these are the rules of the organization laid down for the safety of everyone.”

I asked him. “Creating accidents to dispose of members that are no longer trusted… are you in charge of giving these orders?”

Andemund slowly lowered his eyelids, obscuring his dark, jade-coloured eyes.

He said nothing for a long while. Until I thought he had stopped talking, I heard him say. “Not all of them, but I have given some. Although, the order regarding your parents didn’t come from me. I was yet to join Bletchley Park at the time.”

The order regarding your parents didn’t come from me. 

Peter drove me back to Cambridge. I mulled over it for a long time. Edgar dragged me out from the bed, shoved me into my clothes, chucked me into a bar and began piling drinks on me. The bar was filled with people. A prostitute with a luscious build walked over to us and asked if we could buy her a drink. She was an attractive woman, her breasts shapely and huge, but I disliked the smell of perfume that she gave off. 

Edgar urged me to retrain some semblance of normalcy. 

“You’ve even lost interest in women,” he said.

I didn’t contact Andemund on my own after that. The way he said it was inexplicit, but I understood it well enough. The reason why I couldn’t enter Bletchley Park wasn’t because of my own ability, but because Andemund didn’t trust me. He had investigated me, found out about my parents’ corrupt record, about how they hadn’t died from a fire but had been ‘taken care of’ by the Secret Service due to suspicions of leaking information to the enemy.”

Andemund had explained it clearly. My record was tarnished. When the day came when I was no longer trusted, I would likely be disposed of in similar fashion to how my parents had been taken care of years ago. 

This order would come directly from his command. 

I believed that this was a kind of torture both for me, and for him. And by chasing after him, I was causing trouble for him as well. 

“I don’t like Andemund anymore. “ I swore to Edgar. “The next time you see me going to London, drag me off the car. If I resist, beat me up.”

The summer that year went by particularly quickly. Autumn came afterwards with its sweeping roads buried under fallen leaves. There were many small establishments serving alcohol in Cambridge, their glass wind chimes tinkling pleasantly in front of their doors whenever the wind blew by. I rarely left them ever since Edgar threw me into the bar. Initially, I would decide to limit myself to only one glass of alcohol, but I’d end up sitting inside until the sun set beyond the horizon. All the patrons would have already left by then. The elongated shadows cast from the chairs stretched across the hall from where I sat. 

I didn’t think I was gay. It just so happened that, unfortunately, Andemund was a man. But women in Cambridge were scarce, and closeted homosexuals here were many. 

One night when I had too much do drink, a lanky student came up to me and cooed, babe, there’s a hotel nearby that’ll let us stay the night. How about coming along for some fun?

Night fell deeply. The wind tore through the streets outside, and we were the only two customers left in the bar. The bartender was wiping down the wine glasses some distance away. I didn’t know what he was about to do at first, until he hoisted my drunken self off my seat and began dragging me to the door. 

Although his broad frame boasted of strength, I thought I could still put up a fight against him— if I hadn’t been so severely inebriated at the time, that was. 

I had drank too much rum. The whole world swam as I stood up. He steadied me with a smile and took the opportunity to slip his hands beneath my clothes. 

Perhaps it was because I had had too much to drink that day. I saw Andemund’s black sedan drive through the withered leaves spiraling in the autumn drafts and stop right outside the bar. Peter got off and expressionlessly pulled the door open. Andemund came out from the car, walked through the revolving doors and headed straight for me. Peter directly threw a punch at the man, hauled him out of the establishment, and came back to aid my wobbling descent back into the chair.

Andemund watched the process unfold leaning against the bar table, not a single word uttered from his lips. He wore a white suit that day, complete with a slim black necktie around his neck, hands slipped inside his pockets. When the golden, fallen leaves fluttered by in the window beside him, it made him look as if he was standing within the canvas of a painting.   

He told me, “Alan, just because you’ve left me, doesn’t mean you can go around finding other men.”

Edgar told me that I had hallucinated from drinking too much. Because he was the one who carried me all the way from the bar to my apartment. Nothing of importance had happened that night; I slept like the dead after passing out, drunk. 

He tossed me onto the bed and went straight at me with his fist, punching me awake. When I awoke Edgar was flipping through my notebook. I immediately ripped it from his hands, and he waved dismissively. “I can’t understand anything you’ve written inside.”

The next day I burned the notebook I used to decrypt Code S. 

“If this continues, you’re going to fail this semester.” Edgar transferred my drunken likeness that night into the form of a comic strip, and used it to threaten me. “If you dare get kicked out of school, I’ll reprint this comic a hundred times and stick it throughout the streets and alleyways of Cambridge.”

I ran into Lindon. He came to receive his graduation certificate with his hair in its usual grass-like state, and entered Bletchley Park just like that. To work for the country. We weren’t too keen on each other, but we didn’t dislike each other either. He asked me about Code S that I had mentioned last time, and I shrugged. “I was joking.”

Lindon grinned, revealing his two rows of white teeth, and waggled a finger at me. “You’ve finally lost. I’ve joined Bletchley Park, and you’ve been eliminated.”

I casually joked to Edgar, what would you do if your parents were suspected of betraying the country?

I was modeling for Edgar at the time, having been wrangled into a difficult pose as he painted. He suddenly stopped painting, came over to hug me, and sighed. “If you can’t trust even your own parents, then who would you be able to trust? Isn’t it so, Alan?”

When he sighed, I thought I could sense something from behind his expression. I wasn’t familiar with Edgar’s family background at all. I only knew that his family wasn’t rich, and that he sustained his school fees by selling his art. He was familiar with the art galleries around the area and often sold his finished paintings through them, or would bring other people’s works home to reference off of from there.

I had seen his art before. Some of it were depictions of natural scenery, some portraits of people, and he sometimes sold paintings of me for money too. There were also some that were extremely impressionist, and were so stylistic that they were probably far ahead of the art movements at the time. All the colours and circles and lines in them made no sense to me. I often told him that I could help him draw his impressionist works. I’d been drawing in this style since I was three.

During Christmas, I went back to Bedfordshire for two weeks to live with my uncle. Edgar didn’t go home but kept on selling his art from his rented apartment. Two weeks later, when I returned, he told me Andemund had come to find me. He came alone. 

“I told him you’d went home, and he left just like that.”

That had all happened in 1937. The Third Reich was just beginning in its ascent to power, Italy had left the League of Nations and allied with Germany and Italy, and civil war had broken out in Spain.

I brought the two boxes of books and notes left behind by my father and mother from Bedford to London, and began my long and arduous journey of learning. Every book I finished, I burnt, and in the summer of 1938, I had finally burnt them all into nothing but ash.

*Original text “普策利數學勳章”, pronounced in Mandarin “pu ce li”, lit. Pulitzer Mathematics Medal. Unsure of its real world equivalent. The closest equivalent I could fine, the Pulitzer Prize, is awarded for journalism, literary achievements, and musical composition. 

[6/2/2021] Translator’s notes: very tired. rushed this update but barely managed to proofread it before uploading. too tired to quip in the notes so i will leave the personal comments for future me who will have the honour of painfully reading and editing my 12 am writing.

[7/2/2021] Translator’s notes: Minor grammatical edits made. Very sleepy. Realized I’ve forgotten all my during-translation comments except for the brief few paragraphs where Andemund kissed Alan– i spent way too much time polishing that part for reasons that are very obvious hhhhhhhh