He smiles, an expression both gentle and melancholy. “Read it and discover for yourself.”
She had wanted to believe that once the code was broken so much in William Sullivan’s life, in his children’s lives, would come clear, that a line could be drawn from beginning to end and a true narrative emerge. She sets the pages down, unable to begin, not wanting to finish. It isn’t disappointment she fears, but trespass. To awaken a memory that has no consolation. She remembers a conversation with her mother, from years ago. Gail had asked her mother to tell her about her first love, and her mother had smiled at the question. Your father, she had answered. Your father was my first love, and my first heartbreak.
When they have finished drinking their coffee, she opens her equipment bag and removes the Mini Disc recorder, microphone and cords. They set up a space by the windows, William Sullivan’s diary laid on a table between them. She tells him that she will read the pages this afternoon. Perhaps, for now, they can fill in a few missing pieces about codebreaking, and tomorrow they will talk specifically about the diary.
He nods, one hand brushing the tip of the microphone that she has affixed to him with her usual trick, the bent coat hanger around the neck. “How do I look?” he asks, smiling.
“Sharp. Very sharp.”
They settle into place and Gail listens, assessing the sound of the room. There are no refrigerators, no computer fans whirring. She readies her equipment, then does a sound check, adjusting the needle as Jaarsma rambles on about his hangover. In her earphones, his voice has a low, rich timbre, a melodious accent.
Guided by her questions, he begins to talk about the Vigenère Square, and then cryptography in general. She asks him to assess the personality of someone suited to the work of codebreaking.
He begins to describe the repetitive nature of the work, how codebreakers were recruited from mathematics departments, orchestral groups and crossword puzzle competitions. He beams. “Do you know football?”
Gail shakes her head.
“I’m reminded of a famous quote by Johann Cruyff. He said, ‘If I wanted you to understand, I would have explained it better.’ He was talking about football, but I think what he meant is to trust pure intuition. Follow something less explicit. It is perhaps very unscientific to say, but I think that to break a code you must inhabit the mind of the codemaker. To unravel the clues, you must, to some extent, place yourself within his consciousness.”
Outside, she can hear the whistle of a train passing, and they wait a few moments for the noise to subside. On the far side of the room, a blur of colour catches her attention.
“The print on your wall, Jaarsma. I feel like I should recognize it.”
He smiles, pushing his chair back, stands and walks to the other side of the room. Gail follows closely behind him, wondering whether to pause the tape. She lets the recording continue, taking care to ensure that the wires of the microphone stay clear. Framed beneath the glass, the pictures, six in total, are strange and wild. They hint of seahorse tails, the spiral of a winding nautilus, electric sparks.
“The Mandelbrot Set,” Jaarsma says, running his fingertips over one of the prints. “A collection of points derived from the quadratic equation z = z2 + c. The equation itself is very simple, but the Mandelbrot Set is one of the most complex objects in mathematics. See this boundary here,” he says, indicating a shape enclosed by a band of colour. “Any part of this edge, this cartoid, no matter where, no matter how small, will, if magnified, reveal new points. And these, if further magnified, will also reveal new points, ad infinitum.”
Gail moves closer to the wall, gazing at the pictures. Each successive print is a magnification of a detail of the last. The last frame is labelled as being a ratio of 1:1 million.
“The boundary encloses a finite area, but the boundary itself is infinite. No matter how much we increase the magnification, the same shapes appear and reappear in the border, though never quite the same. The image reveals a kind of symmetry, not of left and right, but of large scales and small ones.
“Imagine that we are standing here,” he says. Unexpectedly, he takes her hand, ever so gently, and places it on a corner of the print. “I can imagine what the rest of the picture is like because this is a fractal image, and it is self-similar. It repeats. But to imagine the entire picture is akin to standing on a street corner and trying to imagine what England looks like from an airplane, or from Mars. I can extrapolate, but what I see at this level may not conform to my expectations of what it will look like as we move in space and time.
“Do you know how birds fly in formation? As far as we know, they hold no picture in their minds of the V formation, let alone the vast pattern of migration. They are aware only of the other birds in their immediate proximity. And the same is true for me; I respond to what is immediately around me. But the pattern that I cannot see, that I have no knowledge of, exists. My mind, my brain, is not made to imagine distances of great magnitude. Or infinite time, eternity. We glimpse a part of the puzzle and intimate, however vaguely, an answer. But if I read a book about geography, or the history of the Earth, or the universe, for that matter, how does that change the way I place myself within this formation?”
She gazes at the boundary, the intricate details. “It changes nothing and everything.”
Jaarsma smiles, delighted. “Precisely.”
She turns off the recorder and removes her headphones. “If I wanted to find someone in the Netherlands,” she says, “how would I go about it?”
He is taken aback by the question. “The telephone book?” he says, finally, not sure if she is serious.
“There is someone I want to find.”
Jaarsma walks across the room to his computer. He opens a browser and enters a Dutch Internet address. When the page has opened, he looks up at her, fingers resting on the keyboard.
Gail retrieves her notebook from her bag and opens it to the last page, where she had written, this morning, the name that she cannot shake loose: Sipke Vermeulen. Jaarsma studies the page, then types in the words. Almost instantaneously, an address and phone number appear on the screen.
That night, Gail stays awake. Her suitcase is open, the contents still neatly packed. Jaarsma’s translation of the diary is open before her, twelve pages of single-spaced type. William Sullivan, she thinks, all his thoughts transcribed into numbers, multiplied and added to themselves, a testament to what a person might do to make all their words disappear.
She imagines him working with pencil in hand, copying the numbers onto a sheet of looseleaf. Over and over, he erases his numbers and begins again. How is it possible to forget pain, to be unable to recall something that was once so inescapable?
In the diary, there is no detailing of violence witnessed and endured, of friends executed, of resistance. That, in the end, is what Gail finds so startling. She knows, through her research, that in the Hong Kong camp, a third of the men died before the war ended. In the prisoner-of-war camp in Sandakan, only six of three thousand men lived to see liberation. William Sullivan kept the diary as proof of a different kind of existence, where part of him still saw the world as if he were free. He wrote about their rituals, what time they got up in the morning, the kind of trees that grew outside the camp, the food they ate, the girl smugglers who passed by outside. “Some are as young as ten years old. Their clothes hang together with invisible thread.” And another entry: “My most prized possession is a set of three tin dishes. They came to me through various hands, and they are useful for all sorts of things. Food, chiefly. But also to gather leaves for tea, to hold on to a bit of water. They are valuable also because, in a time of necessity, they can be traded for pills or medicine.” Through these sentences, these pages, he would make the world cohere.