The Heart at War by Catherine Banner

Author:Catherine Banner [Banner, Catherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-37610-7
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Published: 2015-05-26T00:00:00+00:00

One evening in April, Sebastian handed me back my papers. “I’ve done it,” he said. “I’ve translated it.”

I seized the papers and turned them over. Sure enough, he had written words in neat pencil underneath every coded number. My very dear nephew …, the letter began.

“How did you do it?” I said, seizing Sebastian by the shoulder. “You must be some kind of prodigy.”

He flushed with pleasure. “No, no, it was easy. This doesn’t require mathematics, because it isn’t a proper code. It’s a book cipher, Isak. The only reason I know about them at all is because I’ve read a little about cryptography. It’s a famous old method they used in the last war.”

“A book cipher.” I had never heard of it. “What’s that?”

“Well, you see, each of these numbers really tells you a page number, a line number, and the number of words along that line. You need the right book—the same copy and of course the same edition as the code-maker—to work it out. So for example, here, the first set of numbers is 11143. So you go to page eleven of this poetry book, line fourteen, word three. And you end up with …”

I turned the pages and frowned. “Many,” I said. “Not my.”

“This was the complicated part,” said Sebastian. “Because the code also incorporates a simple shifting pattern. The date on the top of the letter, here, gives you the clue. If you go one word along, then one line down, then eight words along, then eight words down, you get the real word, which is—”

“My,” I said. “You’re right.” I repeated the pattern for the next number, and the next, kneeling in the dust before our hut with the papers spread in front of me. Very and dear.

“I can see why he chose Diamonn,” said Sebastian. “He’s the poet with the greatest vocabulary in our language.”

I knew that fact too; my grandfather had told me so once. “How did you work all this out?” I asked him.

“Trial and error. A lot of error. But there’s something unfortunate—he hasn’t done this right. He should have told you separately which book to use, not sent it in the envelope with the document. Anyone can decode it if they do the same thinking work that I have.”

“The Imperialists have copies of these papers. Will they have managed?”

“I don’t know. It might take them a while to work out the part about the date. It took me some time. I only realised because it was so strange, the way he put the date in numbers like that, with no dashes, nothing. Like a code of its own.”

“Thank you, Sebastian,” I said, running my hands over the pages. “Really, thank you.”

As soon as I could, I got away from the others, ran with the papers to the old steel container, and knelt down behind it in the shadow, where I could not be seen from the farm. Only then did I begin to read.

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