Notes from the Grey Tower

Andemund and I had already broken up, and would interfere with each other’s lives no longer. Ever since I cleared up my relationships with the ‘friends’ I made at the bar, he’d stopped causing trouble for me nearly a year now. 

“We have nothing to do with each other.” I told Arnold. “I don’t like him anymore.”

“Your expression earlier looked as if you were going to eat Lindon alive,” he reminded me.

I didn’t say anything. I drank my beer and tilted my head to stare outside the window. The sunlight was wonderfully bright outside.

“Psychology is my profession. I can make you truly fall out of love with him. You would thereon feel nothing about him, just like how you feel nothing when you look at the apple tree over there.”

I gave it a glance, and found the apple tree greatly captivating under the sunlight.

And I thought about Andemund, and how the pink petals of the apple flowers laid scattered on his shoulders.

“Mr. Garcia lives a vastly different life from you. You know that he’s highly ranked within the MI6. He bears the… um, fate of the country on his shoulders. Now that you two’ve broken up, your feelings towards him have become rather troubling to his work. There is the possibility that people may take advantage of your feelings towards him and disadvantage him that way.”

“Can you do it?” I was skeptical.

He lightly swirled the coupe glass between his fingers. The blue colour of the half-consumed cocktail was distracting. “I could erase your memories, too, if you wanted to.”

“Through surgery? Or through medication?”

“Through medication,” he said. “But that won’t be necessary for making you fall out of love with someone. Conversation only will suffice.”

Of course, I didn’t take anything he said seriously. I was pouring all my time and passion into the decryption of the Enigma, and had no time to be conversing with him at all.

But Arnold’s presence was like that of a spectre. He would always appear at your most unguarded moments, and ask you questions that you were wholly unprepared for. Until I realized that he had become an inextricable part of my life and wanted to cast him out of it, it was already too late. 

The psychologist with his perpetual Cheshire grin and indiscernible expression behind his gold-rimmed glasses. 

One day as I was buried in my calculations, the door to the activity room was suddenly pushed open. I thought it might have been Edgar, but as I lifted my head I came to face Arnold instead. He naturally sat down opposite of me and draped his coat over the chair. 

His questions every time were straight to the point. “What part of Andemund do you even like about?”

I answered without so much as raising my head. “He’s good-looking”

Looking back at it now, it wasn’t really because of his appearance that I was so attracted to Andemund. My parents had left me early on in my childhood and I had been raised under my uncle’s care. My uncle was a kind man, but his temper was horrid. From what I remembered, I could only obtain what I wanted for myself if only I had put in the effort. Andemund’s feelings were like slivers of sunlight that I’d managed to grasp after spending all I had on him. Once I’d got ahold of them, I was unwilling to let go. He was so quiet and gentle, his smile enthralling, and he was always going along with my whims when we used to be together. I had naively thought that I would be able stay together with him as long as I poured enough of myself into our relationship, and would be able to spend the rest of our days in peace. 

I’d only realized later that he was just a pervert with a pretty face. But at the time I wasn’t aware of the latter, so I could only answer Arnold with “he’s good-looking.”

“Why ask?” I asked him.

Arnold stared at me with his deep brown eyes. “Because I am a psychologist. In order to treat an illness, I must be aware of its cause. And in order to make you no longer like Mr. Garcia, I must be informed of why you like him in the first place.”

“Homosexuality isn’t an illness,” I told him.

Arnold dragged me off to an underground bar. In the noisy establishment, men went around baring their arms with tattoos curling around their biceps, and the prostitutes entangled themselves with the men with their powder-white limbs. Their lips were painted brightly red, breasts held high, and their dresses were so short that they barely covered their thighs.

He made me sit in a corner, ordered two beers for us, took off his glasses and leaned cross-legged on the chair, and began appraising the women in the bar with practiced familiarity. Without his glasses, Arnold’s appearance was much more demure. If it weren’t for what he was saying, I would have thought him as a scholar who had entered the bar by pure accident.

“What about the woman beside the bar table… yes, the one with the D-cup breasts. Looks to be the quiet type. On closer look her face’s not bad, either. Sex with her should be a first-rate experience. Alan, or do you prefer wilder women in bed?”

I was struck with thought that my conversations with Edgar about the cafe waitresses along the River Cam were all too virtuous. Arnold’s musings were on a whole another level when compared with them.

“You often come to places like these?”

He smiled. “One of the ways I like to kill time with.”

“If you look closely, the woman by the painting over there just might not be less pretty than your Andemund.”

I glanced over to where he was pointing at and exasperatedly spoke. “Whom I like is my own personal matter. May I go home now?”

Arnold grasped me by the shoulder and pressed me back into my seat. “Alan, we’ve been looking at lot of women. Are you really not interested at all?”

It wasn’t about whether they were men or women. It was the fact that they weren’t Andemund.

Andemund, standing by the apple tree with its pink petals scattered over his shoulder, smiling at me with his emerald-green eyes. 

Arnold said, you only needed one reason to fall in love with somebody, but to fall out of love with them you needed a lot more reasons than one. He was trying to search for the reason that would make me give up on Andemund the most. 

In actuality, he didn’t have search for it. I had already given up.

It was only that true apathy was still a long way ahead for me. 

I wasn’t as cold-blooded as Andemund, to be able spend my time with someone while we were together, and then once broken up fully withdraw my feelings for them. To leave a clean slate behind, no remnants of the past remaining in the present.

After a while of trying his best around me, Arnold grimly announced. “Alan, it seems that I’ll need to devise a new strategy. Mr. Garcia is my top superior. How would I explain to him if I couldn’t accomplish a task as small as this?”

He spoke to me apologetically. “Pardon me for taking up a bit of your time each week.”

I told myself, since Andemund wanted to do away with the past half of the year we had been together, I would be fine with leaving that behind too. Thus I tried to cooperate with Arnold.

The way he ‘took up a bit of my time’ was by taking me out on dates.

Every weekend, before Lindon came to me, he would come along first and bring me to a cafe. He often did this during the afternoon, the seats he chose always next to the windows, where you could see the endless cerulean skies above England. The times were already worsening by then. Prices of commodities were already beginning to soar, but the coffee Arnold ordered for me was always of the most expensive kind, and he would insist on paying for me, too.

We would mainly chat during our dates.

He drank his coffee sip by sip. “Alan, the reason why I can’t propose an effective treatment for you, is because I don’t understand you well enough.”

We talked about everything. About the times, about economic policies, about our childhood memories. In the name of medical treatment, he asked about my parents, and asked about my first love, too. I told him about the girl whom I went after while still living with my uncle at Bedford, about how I sang her a love song with a rose between my lips, and how my tongue was stung full of thorns afterwards. Arnold laughed voraciously at that, back arched and head thrown back, and I gloomily sat as the whole cafe watched him break into laugher. 

I reminded him afterwards. I’d said so much about myself, but he hadn’t told me anything about himself at all.

Arnold took off his gold-rimmed glasses, wiped them down slowly with a piece of cleaning cloth, and said nothing for a good while. His eyes were narrow, the bridge of his nose tall, and without his glasses he looked more dignified than I had imagined. Then he smiled and divulged briefly.

Arnold came from a family with a long history of serving the military, where expectations fell on him since childhood to protect Britain as a military man when he grew up. He’d been extremely well-read as a child, entered the Royal College of Physicians at the age of seventeen, and graduated four years later at the top of his class. 

“I wrote some papers on psychology when I was still in school. In the beginning, I’d thought that there wouldn’t be an audience for papers on such a tedious subject, but when I graduated I was contacted by the MI6 asking if I would be willing to contribute to the country through some exceptional means.”

“Sounds unexciting,” I commented.

“Quite so.” He smiled. “Our family was comparatively uptight, unfortunately. That’s why I don’t have any stories of my own to tell like yours, like putting salt in my neighbor’s milk, or crouching by the road waiting for a breeze to lift the skirts of passing girls.”

I was about to sympathize with him when he continued with, “since all the girls I liked would come willingly to bed with me. I had too many girlfriends in university and my father didn’t look too kindly upon that, so that’s when I took the opportunity to slip into Bletchley Park.”

I didn’t ask what kind of family background Arnold came from. I didn’t think he would have answered if I’d asked, either.

At the same time, Andemund and I continued going around in circles in regards to the decryption of the Enigma.

Trying to break a cipher was in fact trying to find faults in the design of the cipher. Some of them were as faulty as broken sieves, while some were as impervious as gold. But no matter how tightly guarded a house may be, it would always contain a window somewhere. Our job was to find that single window in the darkness, and push it open to let the sunlight in.

Andemund and I continued to improve on the formula I handed in to him.

I told Lindon about my latest ideas, and after discussing them with Andemund he would relay Andemund’s thoughts back to me.

There was almost no progress at all in the first two weeks.

I wrote up a solution, and Andemund shot it down.

I wrote up a solution again, and Andemund shot it down once more.

In the meantime, I managed to find out a flaw in the Enigma machine. In its encryption process, it made use of three rotors and a reflector. Therefore, its encryption process was reversible. If you encrypted the letter ‘A’ through the reflector to return ‘F’, then encrypting the letter ‘F’ would also return the letter ‘A’. If utilized correctly, this would become a fatal weakness in the encryption process of the Enigma. It would greatly reduce the possible unknowns in our decryption formula. 

It was because of this Lindon had to return to Cambridge twice or thrice each week.

To my indignation he began wearing a small tie around his collar. I sniffed at it up close. “Perfume.”

“Mr. Garcia and I went for a drive beside the lake.” he said. “He said the fresh air was good for thought.”

My first reaction was to question why didn’t Andemund bring me out for a drive while I was deciphering Code S.

Lindon boldly continued. “He said he liked my way of approaching problems. Said that it was very unique.”

“That’s my way of approaching problems,” I reminded him.

He gave me a strange look. “But Alan, with how sloppy you are right now, there’s no way Mr. Garcia would like you, would he?”

In the good old days when I used to be among the most attractive men along the River Cam, what woman wouldn’t have thrown themselves in my arms? Then I came across Andemund, began investing in cryptography, and ended up where I was with a week’s worth of stubble on my chin. Arnold never gave his judgement on my appearance, but Edgar had begun to tell me that I had gained a kind of mature attractiveness.

I felt aggrieved. “There was a time when your Mr. Garcia liked me. We dated for a year.”

Lindon paled instantly. “Impossible. That’s Mr. Garcia you’re talking about! Who do you think you are? —he said he liked me.”

“That’s your way of thinking he likes—“ I pointed out, “and that’s my way of thinking we’re talking about.”

I reminded Lindon just like how Edgar reminded me in the past that homosexuality was against the law, and added. “He’s just very good-looking, that’s all there is.”

Lindon didn’t believe me and went up to ask Andemund. Andemund, the bastard, had no intention of hiding it whatsoever. He nodded and said, “Right, Alan and I were romantically involved for a year.” He reassured Lindon. “Though we aren’t involved anymore now.”

And then he made Lindon relay to me: “Tell Alan that it was only his appearance that redeemed him during that time.”

I wanted to flip Andemund off, but I had no way of doing so without seeing him in person.

Andemund’s “it was only his appearance” implied that although my appearance was agreeable with him at first, I had lost even the advantage of my looks now.

[15/2/2021] Translator’s notes: I translated the first half of the chapter a few days ago, but hdkfjadhadsfjlkj Arnold and Alan’s dynamic makes me very excited to translate their interactions every time. Sorry for the rather late update and I know I complain about my academics every time, but damn if i’m not extremely screwed for my finals.

Recently started reading Alan Turing: the Enigma out of pure interest on the matter and the more I read the more I viscerally feel how well-researched this novel is. Obviously Alan Caster isn’t Alan Turing but I can’t believe this novel managed to make me read a 700 paged biography about pure math and computer science like some raunchy homosexual love novel. Anyways my mock exams are in a few days, so the next update will come probably rather late. On a happier note, I’m almost a fifth through translating the whole novel. I look forward to getting to the raunchy part…