Birds

Birds are a recurring image for what decryption seeks but seldom secures: a living, moving target that may be grasped only through rare ability or approached indirectly by careful observation. The image sets John Nash’s imagined capacity to capture a bird in flight against Liseiwicz’s more cautious, analytical genius, then reappears in the fragmentary language of Rong Jinzhen’s notebook as a bird and a waiting cage.

The bird as the object of decryption

The bird image first makes an abstract intellectual task physical. The passage compares decryption to reaching into the sky: the purpose is not simply to stretch toward empty air, but to catch a bird that is there, even though a bare-handed capture is terribly unlikely. The difficulty is not declared absolute. A few people may miraculously succeed; most, despite spending their whole lives at the attempt, obtain only a few feathers. The image thus distinguishes between contact with traces and possession of the elusive whole. A feather can suggest that something was reached, without proving that the bird itself was caught.

The passage names this act as decryption, giving the bird its clearest function in the book’s conceptual vocabulary. It stands for the concealed object a codebreaker tries to apprehend: present enough to make pursuit meaningful, difficult enough that labor alone does not guarantee success. The image holds possibility and remoteness together. It does not make capture impossible, but it makes success exceptional, and leaves the difference between partial evidence and complete understanding sharply visible.

Nash, Liseiwicz, and different kinds of genius

Asked who might truly catch the bird, the narration tentatively proposes John Nash. The claim remains a possibility rather than a report of a witnessed feat. Liseiwicz, by contrast, is said not to be able to catch it himself, though his genius is not necessarily inferior to Nash’s. The distinction is therefore not a simple ranking of intelligence. It concerns how each kind of ability meets an unpredictable target.

The imagined comparison makes that difference precise. Nash might reach out at the moment a bird passes, but even the narrator cannot confidently foresee when he would act. Liseiwicz’s possible advantage lies elsewhere: by attending to Nash’s gaze, the instant his hand begins to move, and the qualities of his movement, he might judge when the attempt would come. He would also watch the sky itself, noting the number of birds, their speed and paths, their particular features, and changes in their motion. The passage turns observation into a second-order form of pursuit: Liseiwicz may not seize the bird directly, but he might read the conditions under which another person could.

Their contrasting styles deepen the image. Liseiwicz’s genius is described as rigorous, cautious, and beautiful, with an angelic or godlike quality; Nash’s is unfamiliar, seeming freakish and uncivilized. The account then connects Nash’s unsettling strangeness to the moral darkness associated with ciphers, which it presents as evidence of human craftiness, treachery, and sinister intent. In that frame, the prospect that Nash could approach the bird is both an intellectual possibility and a disturbing one: unusual proximity to the cipher’s hidden object carries an association with the devilish character the passage attributes to cryptography.

From open sky to waiting cage

Much later, the bird image returns in brief, separated fragments associated with Rong Jinzhen’s notebook. One fragment declares that a cage is expecting a bird; another reduces the image to the exclamation of a bird. The notebook then asks whether he has struggled enough and repeats the expectation of a cage, ending with an unfinished qualification. These lines do not explain what the bird is, who is waiting, or what further condition the unfinished phrase would have supplied. Their incompleteness is part of the evidence, not a puzzle the text resolves.

The change in setting alters the image’s pressure. In the earlier passage, the bird moves through an open sky and the challenge is to catch it. In the notebook fragments, attention shifts to a cage that waits. The bird is no longer only the object of an active pursuit; it is also the absent presence around which an enclosure has been prepared. The repeated wording offers expectation without fulfillment, while the exclamation briefly names the bird without describing its arrival or capture. Together, the fragments preserve the motif’s uncertainty rather than converting it into a definite event.

The image within Rong Jinzhen’s notebook

The narration describes Rong Jinzhen’s notebook as jumbled and at times obscure, so the bird passages appear within a text whose sequence and meanings are not always clear. The narrator can nevertheless trace a different thread in its pages: Rong Jinzhen’s love for Di Li grows, and his feelings evolve, becoming especially apparent in the later sections. Di Li removed passages that the narrator suspects were intimate and emotional, perhaps more obscure than the rest; she had said that Rong Jinzhen never expressed his love straightforwardly, though some of his words might have carried that meaning.

That account gives the notebook a context of difficult expression, but it does not establish that the bird or cage fragments refer specifically to Di Li or to their relationship. Their proximity to the narrator’s discussion of the notebook invites attention to what its fragmentary language may hold, while the missing passages and acknowledged obscurity prevent certainty. The motif consequently links two forms of elusiveness without collapsing them: the cipher that resists capture and the personal feeling that may be present in words without being directly stated. In both settings, the bird can be recognized as an image, yet what it means or whether it has been caught remains unsettled.